There are still many ways to avoid needing the tilde. There will be normal interpolation as in Perl 5 ("$foo$bar") but new is interpolation of closures ("int($baz) = { int($baz) }", resulting in something like int(5.6) = 5). There is also sprintf, now know as "as" ([$foo, $bar].as("%s%s") or maybe also "%s%s".as($foo, $bar), which may not make sense at first, but will make sense when written as as "%s%s": $foo, $bar).

Personally I don't find ~ hard to type, and I absolutely love its place in Perl 6, not only as the string concatenation operator, but also as the string context operator and the stringy semi-meta operator in bit operators.