The bang (!) sign would make more sense to me. It's already used in css to express priority (!important), so it's not much of a logical jump.
Currently the discussions/draft/etc don't match or agree on what the syntax or capabilities will be.
Our :-hitch-has is based on the original :has proposal and the existing implementation in jQuery as we feel that this is the best (and clearly the most powerful since it allows you to express more).