"I was wondering why that would be?"
Because LOAD is the wrong tool for the job. The fact that LOAD can import text data is merely a historical oddity, a remnant from long ago when MATLAB was a much simpler tool and there were far fewer file formats to import. LOAD has absolutely no documented behavior for hexadecimal values written using the notation you show. In fact, the LOAD documentation only states that "ASCII files must contain a rectangular table of numbers, with an equal number of elements in each row. The file delimiter (the character between elements in each row) can be a blank, comma, semicolon, or tab character. The file can contain MATLAB comments (lines that begin with a percent sign, %)."
Nothing about hexadecimal there.
