This behavior needs to be reverted. There are too many assumptions being made, the quoting used is shell-specific, and not universally supported. For example, consider a file who's name contains a tab, like "a<tab>b".
$ ls 'a'$'\t''b' OK, so that syntax is supported by bash and zsh, so if you're using one of those shells, maybe you know what it means, and you can cut and paste that and make use of it, but in csh or dash, it doesn't mean the same thing.
