This issue has been solved in newer versions of pylint.
My system was picking the version from the ubuntu (13.04) repositories (pylint-0.26.0).
Using a virtualenv
I could pip install pylint-1.0.0 which recognizes named tuples and will actually enforce using the same format as classes.
Note that it won't pick it up if you're doing string manipulation on the fields string. For example:
PersonData = collections.namedtuple('PersonData', 'name ' + 'surname age')
will still cause pylint-1.0.0 to spit out the error code for invalid constant name. In this case the only workaround is to disable the warning as per Martijn Pieters suggestion.