Personally I like the distinction between them as it gives me context for the object being a pointer, which helps with "at-a-glace" reading of clean code.
I discovered long ago that the -> . dichotomy makes it essentially impossible to refactor code by switching a type to/from a value/ref type. It is a major factor in C being a very difficult language to refactor code in. Long lived C code still retains its original design mistakes because of that.
