OMG it took me a while to understand it ... yes it makes sense:

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
 
my @a=('abc');
given (@a) {
    print "$_\n";
    when (/ARRAY/  ) { print "ARRAY\n" ;continue}      # regex-match!
    when (/abc/  ) { print '/abc/'."\n" ;continue}     # no match
    when (qr/abc/  ) { print 'qr/abc/'."\n" ;continue} # smart-match!
}
[download]

OUTPUT:

ARRAY(0x8255a70)
ARRAY
qr/abc/
[download]

Sigh ... do you agree that the docs could be more explicit? :)