I find the arrow perfectly consistent with its use in C and C++. You use an arrow when you access things through a reference. A dot when you access things directly. But in Perl you never really have an object, you have a reference to it and access it through that reference, which matches the notation.

For instance if you make a copy of an object, and adjust that copy, the original changes. If you make a copy of an object and rebless it, the original is now in a different class. Those internal details show that any and all accesses to the object are taking place through a level of dereferencing. If the data was immediate then modifying a copy wouldn't change the other copies. But it isn't immediate and so changes are shared among all references to that object.

That said, Perl 6 is doing a lot to reduce how much the programmer needs to think about explicitly dereferencing data structures. Therefore it makes sense to me to have the arrow change to a dot to indicate the fact that we are supposed to stop thinking so much about dereferencing...