Yep, I read that too. Even so, there are low-pass filters in some consumer gear that benefit from, say, 96k sampling rates and result in better quality sound. This does imply that at 44.1 or 48 they don't represent up to 20kHz properly, of course.
Lossless upsampling the 44.1 kHz recording to, say 192 kHz is trivial for the reproduction equipment. That the LPF on the reproduction end wants the DAC to run at greater than 44.1 kHz has no bearing on the sampling rate of the distribution format.
Are you talking about digital low-pass filters? In the event that they are using one that benefits from a higher sampling rate, they could upsample before applying. Or just use a better low-pass filter implementation.