I agree totally, I think >>op<< sucks quite hard. This may be some kind of "I'm special, look at me!" (*bounces*) neon-flashing-light type thing to make people think about what they are doing, but that seems unPerlish. I could see myself ^op'ing a lot too, more's the pity.
Further, it seems to be that >> and << are just long-hand for « and », irrespectively. So, I can only deduce that it's a) Larry's dastardly plan to force keyboard manufacturers to add more buttons/symbols (thus continuing the "Perl is linenoise" meme) or b) a sop to the French.
Indeed, < and > are such troublesome characters in some scenarios that some languages (ColdFusion, *ick*) don't use them at all. Bizarro. What's worse is that <<>> is a quoting operator, so <<+>> means the string '+', which could lead to some interesting bugs.