Uhhh, yeah, I think that is the simplest way to explain it. You can use more complicated words to describe the action of "braking" like.....The clamping force of the caliper or expanding of the drum shoes create friction which results in heat which is dissipated, etc.

A car can be first started and backed out of the driveway and the brakes will stop the car even though almost no heat has been generated or dissipated yet. The brakes did stop the car by creating a friction between the brake pads/shoes and rotor/drum.
Sometimes people are trained to understand matters in a way that falls far outside the way that is simple to explain to others.
An A/C guy I know gets all pissy when someone says that air conditioning cools the air. He is always quick to state that NO, the air conditioning removes the heat from the air, making it cooler.
So what...? The result is the same.

And a vacuum is a push, not a pull.............................................

Kern Dog wins the round using his go to move; Common Sense.

They use a very high temp (boiling point) brake fluid and heat insulators between the caliper pistons and the brake pads. We used phenolic caliper pistons or "buttons" in the center of the aluminum caliper pistons as stand offs to keep the heat from migrating into the pistons and boiling the brake fluid in the caliper. The brake would still work on the bike in the photos IF I would still have brake pedal pressure but once the fluid turns to a gas you can no longer force or push the brake pads against the disc. Carbon pads and discs will still stop even glowing hot as long as you have fluid pressure to push them against a friction surface (disc). 68HemiB's post is a perfect summary of how brakes work But IMO what happened to the car we're talking about the driver riding or using the brakes to control a sticking throttle he boiled the brake fluid and lost all pedal pressure and at that point you are not going to make any friction and stop or slow down at all. Other factors are the quality and age of the brake fluid in the car and if it has been overheated before and if it has then the threshold for failure gets even lower. Bottom line he cooked the brake fluid and lost pedal pressure. "Energy can neither be created or destroyed" And one cannot say that NO heat or thermal energy is generated in a friction brake system even backing out of the driveway, it has to even if it's one degree that's how it works. Kinetic to Thermal. Thought about making water cooled calipers to keep from boiling the brake fluid but I bet someone already thought of that. I know we make cooling fins for them.

Mike

(note the brake pads are glowing hot too and the heat insulator between the brake pad and caliper in not but it still boiled the brake fluid in this case.)

pretty great reply Mike.
those two other pictures were interesting as well.
as to the doofus this is about, all i can say is : "high performance car, low performance driver"..............[insert your preferred descriptive words here]
if it were me, and the problem were known, i would not drive the car until it was fixed.
reminds me of a guy that stopped over one day. he has a "starskey and hutch" torino.
he said the steering was acting funny, so he took it out to the interstate to see if it still happened at high speed.
one look under the hood, and i found the rag joint from the column to the box had just a TINY piece of rubber holding it together !
after seeing that, i told him he was an a$$ for driving his car that way !
luckily, the local parts place had a joint in stock, and he didn't leave until i fixed it for him. this isn't the first time this guy pulled stupid stunts.
for some reason, he thinks you need 17 floor mats to "protect" the carpet, then says "occasionally" he has to rearrange them so the gas pedal doesn't stick............
good grief..........