This may give you a (slightly golfed) alternate start (on the letters; you have a fine solution for including non-a-zA-Z characters):

C:>perl -E "print 'Enter a char: '; my $char = <>; print $char; print 
+$char =~ /[AEIOU]/i ? 'char is a vowel' : 'char is not a vowel';"
Enter a char: v
v
char is not a vowel
C:>perl -E "print 'Enter a char: '; my $char = <>; print $char; print 
+$char =~ /[AEIOU]/i ? 'char is a vowel' : 'char is not a vowel';"
Enter a char: E
E
char is a vowel
C:>
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