Thanks, ikegami, for the clear proof that indeed the side effect of list assignment is that a list of all values assigned is returned!
This is a consistent extension of the behaviour of the assignment operator in scalar context and exactly in line with what I would have expected.
To re-state my point: ikegami's code only works because of the side-effects associated with the assignment operator (To my personal surprise, ikegami mentioned earlier in this thread that
Side-effects are something to be avoided when programming.