Ok, after some more digging into the docs, I found it really is a new class, it has improvements, but it is only available in Qt5, so you can’t use it if you want to compile on both Qt4 and Qt5:
Notes for QRegExp Users
The QRegularExpression class introduced in Qt 5 is a big improvement upon QRegExp, in terms of APIs offered, supported pattern syntax and speed of execution. The biggest difference is that QRegularExpression simply holds a regular expression, and it’s not modified when a match is requested. Instead, a QRegularExpressionMatch object is returned, in order to check the result of a match and extract the captured substring. The same applies with global matching and QRegularExpressionMatchIterator.