Can webform-civicrm cause an Activity of type Email to actually send the email from CiviCRM
It's not really the opposite of the answer I gave in the other question. The webform-civicrm module does not treat the "send email" activity type as special. Just like the "print pdf" activity type, it dutifully creates the activity, but does not do any extra civi-workflow stuff with it. To actually send an email, I suggest doing this via the webform.