What's an example of 0 having a sign being useful?
TLDR: there are some classes of problems for which the sign bit of zero preserves enough important information to get an accurate solution to a problem that would not be possible if you only had an unsigned zero. These happen to turn up in certain types of conformal mappings that are useful for solving certain PDEs.
1/-0 will give you -∞, of course.
(Strictly speaking, 1/0 in C is kaboom! (undefined behaviour))