Now there are multiple ways to define and transfer ownership. The primary reason for the split of dev and operations team was so that dev teams are not held back maintaining systems when there's more dev work to be done. However the split only works when deployment is a weekly or monthly activity. For Continuous deployment the dev team should be on call till the knowledge transfer can be done.
Where I work we have a split and our process works (in theory).
1. Developers go through the build, test, deploy process
2. Before deployment the dev and operations team meet and the dev team walks the ops team through the code, key changes, key functionality implemented.
3. Ops team poses their questions e.g. what assumptions were made, what are the possible values for a particular config attribute, etc.
4. Once Ops is comfortable they understand the changes the dev team turns over the application to the ops team.
5. This knowledge transfer happens in an hour long meeting with key stakeholders from both teams present.
6. This process is for weekly or biweekly deployments.
7. For a brand new project/product the dev team does a complete walkthrough with the ops team over a period of 1 week and the dev team provides a 6 weeks "warranty" period for the application where in the dev team is on call.