Also any really reflective areas there actually are should be smooth, not roughed up by the normal map. Then again most of those probably have a ground surface rather than being sanded to a mirror shine, which is not really something you can represent properly in the specular workflow.
It's a question of scales. From the intended closest viewing distance (i.e. where you have about one texture pixel per screen pixel), any surface structure of the order of a length scale that corresponds to a few pixels is represented by the normal map. Anything smaller by the reflection map.
Using appropriate blur in the environment reflection in combination with low specular shininess can pretty much reproduce a lot of surface structures - especially if you include Fresnel enhancement of specularity under low angles.
So it depends a bit on what you mean by 'specular workflow' - a standard Blinn-Phong scheme is a bit limited, but if you have a shader which can do environment mapping and Fresnel you can do most (I guess the next big one is then sub-surface scattering which you use for skin).