The whole intuition thing is rather questionable. You learn how things work and then you get used to them. It doesn't matter much whether it's an apple icon or a start button. Neither shouts "shutdown!".

It's much more important how much work frequently repeated actions take once you know them. No keyboard shortcut can ever be intuitive in the sense you could have suspected what it does without learning about it. But it's quick and you can remember it. That's what counts.

Are regular expressions intuitive? No, but just imagine you had to do pattern matching with a language full of very intuitive words, like SQL or COBOL say :)