Here's my, possibly skewed, reasoning as to how it should work, at least in one sense:

$_ = '\\something';      # \\something
$_ = 'It\'s a tragedy';  # It's a tragedy
$_ = '\\'';              # \'
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Of course, the last example would probably strike many a C programmer as being far too bizarre to comprehend.

This is why I expected the q() operator to behave differently. As it was pointed out, the only reason for \\ is because of the requirement for \', which would imply that if \' were no longer an issue, \\ would cease to be relevant as well.

Here's what I would expect, and yet this is not the case:

$_ = q[\\something];     # \\something
$_ = q[It's a tragedy];  # It's a tragedy
$_ = q[\'];              # \'
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Update:
The last "should" example is parsed as such:

',\,\','

That is to say, that this is really a single quote, followed by a single backslash, followed by the token \', followed by a single quote.