The answer to this is sitting right next to another interesting fact from the google forums, how does google count page hits?
From: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=11df99a64a48364c&hl=en
“Caching: Google Analytics directly calls Google’s servers each time a page is visited, even if the page has been cached. Other analytics solutions may not record an additional visit if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache.”