Yeah, digital camera sensors (both CCD and CMOS) can see a rather wide range of frequencies beyond visible light, but the sensor's pixels also have no concept of color.
To get color, a Bayer Filter is employed inside the sensor. The Bayer Filter is basically a mask of alternating red/green, green/blue filters. With this filter, certain pixels can only see red, some only blue, and some only green. However, those filters are "leaky" and will let some IR light through.
Also remember that the sensor itself doesn't have any concept of color; the software interpreting the data from the sensor has to know what color filter is over each pixel. Then, the data is encoded in the YCbCr colorspace using either JPEG (photo), or H.264 (video). Thus, no colors beyond the YcBcR colorspace are physically encoded.
To see near-IR light, we are depending on the "leakage" of the Bayer Filters to allow some IR light to reach the individual red, green, and blue filtered pixels. Generally, the green filter leaks very little IR light, while the red and blue filters are quite leaky to IR light. Because of this, IR light is seen as purple in photos (or videos) shot with a color camera where the ICF has been removed. Many night vision purists remove these filters to try to improve the flow of IR through the lenses.
The Sony Night Shot IR CCD graph looks like this:
In the graph of the Sony Night Vision CCD, visible light is the blue shaded area to the left and the IR spectrum is to the right, so as both Hardware and I were thinking, digital could benefit from a much more specialized IR illuminator.
Why the digital manufacturers and reps do not know what they are selling just shows the extreme disconnect between their engineers and the marketing/sales staff, this is not rocket science stuff, but most of their marketing reps quack like ducks....