It is an intentional feature of Perl that a backslash followed by a non-word character always means the literal character, whether in a regex or a double-quoted string. Other languages and tools may use \( and \) for capturing parentheses, or \< and \> for word boundaries.

Perl's rule is very simple. Personally, I don't see any harm in taking advantage of it. In fact, I think it is less likely to cause confusion, because another programmer can just look at the code and know immediately that \< means a literal <, without having to look at the docs or trying it out.