qr// returns a reference blessed into the "Regexp" package (so, no, the documentation for ref is not broken).

Aah, ok, so the perl 5.10 pod saying "The result Regexp indicates that the argument is a regular expression resulting from qr//"(emphasis mine), really means the same thing in less detail and nothing has changed between 5.8 and 5.10 in this regard? (I'm assuming this since grinder mentions that an actual change has been made in 5.11)

if you make an object based on a blessed qr// ref, then everthing continues to work but there is no good way to see that the ref is a compiled regex

Gotcha, I won't worry about this for now (I'm trying to build something with minimal dependencies), but thank you for the pointer to Data::Dump::Streamer->regex(), that looks really useful.