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PaulI agree that OPS is, strictly speaking, a meaningless stat. But it is VERY close to what may be the most meaningful stat. There was a book written in the 80s called the Hidden Game of Baseball. (Great book!) The author determined the historic "run value" of a single, double, triple, and home run. Looking over every box score ever, he figured out, on average, how many runs a single, double, triple, or home run contributed to the score for the player's team. Based on this, he assigned a value to singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. Each single represents x runs, each double represents y runs, etc. I think the author also assigned a value to walks.
What you get is something very similar to slugging percentage, but with different weights. Instead of singles, doubles, triples, and homers being worth 1,2,3, and 4 points, they are given values based on the historic values of these hits.
It turns out that adding together the traditional slugging percentage plus on base percentage comes very close to giving you the same numbers as the formula from the Hidden Game of Baseball.