I'm using Parent / Child product patterns so the parent is not published. The published child products in my implementation do not have (detailed) descriptions.
The unpublished parent product's description is shown on the child product detail page on the front end.
I believe this should not happen when the parent is not published.
And and following the same issue:
If you write the page title for your parent product this will appear also in the child products.
Yes you can change it later in the child products, same as the description.
So basicly what I assume is that the childs unless they have own page title, descriptions etc they inherit the one's from the parent.
Don't know to what extend this is correct or not, may be useful for others. Not an issue for us since we fill in every description and title in both parent and childs.