I would take "actual file" as meaning the file the symlink points to, so I'd say the documentation matches the implementation according to your description of the two.  The current docs actually say "refer to the same file or directory", and mention os.stat explicitly, so again I'd say the docs and implementation match.

It sounds like what you want is to open a feature request for a samefile equivalent that does not follow symlinks.  lsamefile?

We could use this issue for making the docstring match the docs, though.  I think the sentence in the docs is short enough to just get copied into the docstring.