Well, contrariwise, it's useful in its current form if you want to be able to short-circuit out empty lists without having to do an explicit test. For (contrived, but based on a real-world memory) example:

sub contrivance {
    my $min = shift;
    my $max = some_function();
    for ($min .. $max) {
        print "I think that $_ is a valid possibility\n";
    }
}
[download]

Contrived, as I said. But the point is that you can readily find a family of uses for the range operator where you'd want to return an empty list rather than counting backward if the RHS is less than the LHS, just as you can (and indeed, you have) for the opposite. Apparently, Larry thought my use case was more common than yours—lucky me, huh? :-)