I wouldn't call it a non-issue yet. They dug the trench in a hematite rich area, so they could see whether it's a lag deposit on the surface, or if it's there in deeper layers too.

One way or another they are being careful with reporting any results about that outcrop. With the basalts at Gusev, they released spectra and interpretations of them very quickly. Same too for the soil at Meridiani, even.

But with the outcrop, it's been well over a week, and we haven't seen anything in the way of TES, APXS, or Mossbauer data, other than the comment that it has a lot of sulfur. Nor have they said much at all about at the press conferences, other than that it's fascinating and they are working on it.

I think Gary is right, though. If it looked like aqueous sediments, I suspect they would have at least leaked something about "there are a lot of smiles here" or something like that. Not dead silence.

And, the fact that the rover is headed for the nearby large crater sooner rather than later suggests something. If they thought they had the smoking gun right here, they'd do more detailed analysis, use the RAT and get spectra at several locations. They wouldn't run the risk of breaking the rover on its way to hopefully better exposures, they'd nail it down cold while they had the chance.