I now develop websites and XML interfaces since 7 years, and never, ever came in a situation, where it was really necessary to use the > for a >. All disambiguition could so far be handled by quoting <, &, " and ' alone.
Has anyone ever been in a situation (related to, e.g., SGML processing, browser issues, XSLT, ...) where you found it indespensable to escape the greater-than sign with >?
Update: I just checked with the XML spec, where it says, for example, about character data in section 2.4:
Character Data
[14] CharData ::= [^<&]* - ([^<&]* ']]>' [^<&]*)
So even there, the > isn't mentioned as something special, except from the ending sequence of a CDATA section.
This one single case, where the > is of any significance, would be the ending of a CDATA section, ]]>, but then again, if you'd quote it, the quote (i.e., the literal string ]]>) would land literally in the output (since it's CDATA).
You don't need to absolutely because almost any XML interpreter will understand what you mean. But still you use a special character without any protection if you do so.
XML is all about semantic, and this is not really semantic compliant.
About your update, you forgot this part :
The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " > ", and must, for compatibility, be escaped using either "
>" or a character reference when it appears in the string "]]>" in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.
The use case given in the documentation is more about something like this :
<xmlmarkup>
]]>
</xmlmarkup>
Here the ]]> part could be a problem with old SGML parsers, so it must be escaped into = ]]> for compatibilities reasons.