i, too, was puzzled by this, and ended up concluding that the "$Name$" trick didn't work. further discussions on IRC and some playing around revealed that, at least in my case, it only worked after i had both committed that to the .info file, then pulled a completely fresh checkout of the module (checkout, not update!).
i think the deal is that CVS name expansion doesn't work for updates? perhaps Derek will grace us with the actual mechanics... :)
it might be a good idea to get something in the official doc about how the name expansion works exactly, because it's certainly not self-evident. :)
chad