A rationale (which people may dislike or disagree with) is that we might like to have the short, easy to type version of an operator perform the most common operation that we typically do on each type (even if it isn't logical).
If so, we'd also probably want a more specialized, longer named version of the operator that does the precise operation such as checking for object identity for all types (which we currently don't have in Arc without dropping into Racket).
