It's actually pretty common to have an examples/ dir included with the distribution. It's fairly rare for any of the examples to actually install anywhere. LWP comes with a few programs that install in /usr/bin, so you might check there for an example of installing examples...

For examples of modules that include examples that don't install, look at things like POE, Mail::SPF::Query, Math::BigInt, Digest::SHA, Archive::Zip, Compress::Zlib, et al. (Those are just some of the ones that happened to be in my .cpan/build dir.)

I think it is indeed the standard practice to include the examples but not install them. I imagine the idea is that if people want the examples then they can perl -MCPAN -e 'get Distro::Name' even if they weren't the ones that actually installed the module.