I agree that this is not really intuitive.
To detect the version match Windows Installer uses the same algorithm as for file overwriting. This means: if the existing version of the file is identical to the version you specified in your setup, it compares the language. Only if theversion of the existing file is higher than the MinVersion in your setup it will ignore the language.
This is documented in MSI help topic Signature Table at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/msi/setup/signature_table.asp(see the note for MinVersion)