The simple answer is that some exceptions had to
be made to print, in particular some exceptions had
to be made to the syntax of HANDLE in the interest of simplicity over consistentcy.

print $x{handle},"\n"; is valid to STDOUT
print {$x{handle}} $x{handle},"\n"; FILEHANDLE $x{handle} with value $x{handle}

I think the idea was to make the "normal", "usual" syntax as easy as possible, even if this caused some trouble in less common cases.