Yes, and no. If you drive them hard enough, you can kill them quite quick, and conversely, if used at very low drive levels they could last darn near forever.
You will see claims for life span ranging from 10,000 hours to 50,000 hours or more for quality power LED's like Cree XRE's, Seouls P4's etc, but if I recall, the spec. current for those LED's is typically 350 mA. For a really bright light, you will probably be driving the LED at around 1,000 mA, give or take a couple of hundred, so no way it will last those kind of hours at full blast. Keep in mind that 10,000 hours is well over a year, non-stop.
The key for me is using multi-level lights, since aside from biking, I rarely need a long run of max-brightness. 350 mA is a common "medium" level, and is DARN bright for most purposes, so most of my runtime comes from even much lower settings. In general, if you can keep the LED cool, it will last a long time, so low levels, short runs on high levels, good heat sinking and a way to remove heat from the outside of the light all help. That last one means try not to set the light down in still air on high for long. In your hand, heat will be transfered to your body rather effectively, and when attached to a bike helmet or handlebar, the stiff breeze is extremely effective at keeping a light running on high cool.
All of these currents get scaled up a fair bit if you get into the quad-die LED's like the Cree MCE and Seoul P7. I just got my first MCE, a PLI from Shiningbeam, for my bike. It runs at over 2,000 mA on high, and medium is almost 1,000 mA on a fresh charge, and is indeed about as bright as any of my single-die lights. Surprisingly, it does not seem to build heat any worse at higher power levels than the single die lights, but of course goes through a battery much faster.
To answer your specific question about the LD20, the way I use my original L2D model (it's predicessor, the first digital Cree model), absolutely, I will probably be able to give it to one of my grankids, if I ever have any. If you crank down the head to turbo, and run out full charges of NiMH's daily, I am not so sure how long it would last before you notice some loss of brightness, but if it were done on a bike for commuting, as many have done, I still think it would last a very long time. Of the many daily bike users of that light that I have read reports from here, I have never yet seen one about loss of brightness in the Cree, and they are the biggest users of long turbo runs, also with good cooling to match.