Ruby's OO syntax for regular expressions is actually quite easy to use. It's very clean and easy to read -- I just have to think about it differently than I think about Perl regexen.

OO syntax can be made very nice to use with regexen, as Ruby has proven. The problem isn't with an OO approach, but with a noun-centric, obtuse OO approach. Ruby's standard OO syntax for regex handling is a bit more verb-centric (where "method" == "verb") and involves implicit instantiation of a regex object in a method call, where the object to which the message is being passed is the string on which the method operates. For instance:

string_var = 'Java is my language. Java Rules!'
puts string_var.gsub(/Java/, 'Ruby')

. . . with output:
Ruby is my language. Ruby Rules!

You can also do this by passing a block to the String#gsub method:

string_var = 'ruby is my language. ruby rules!'
puts string_var.gsub(/r/) { |char| char.upcase }

. . . with output:
Ruby is my language. Ruby Rules!

Putting it all together (same output):

string_var = 'Java is my language. Java rules!'
puts string_var.gsub(/Java/, 'Ruby').gsub(/r/) { |char| char.upcase }

Compare with Perl's syntax:

my $string_var = 'Java is my language. Java rules!'
$string_var =~ s/Java/Perl/;
$string_var =~ s/r/R/;
print "$string_var\n";

Personally, I think they're different -- but about equally readable and easy to use. Of course, I can understand where the impression that OO syntax for regexen is obtuse and annoying -- because with most OO syntaxes, it is obtuse and annoying. Python comes to mind (largely because regex functionality exists outside the core language), and Java is even worse.