The idea is to cater to perl-culture, not necessarily to re-write everything in perl. One of the features of perl culture is it's pragmatism: there's a willingness to work with other code (and to steal ideas from anything that wanders by...). Just to take one example, arguably, familiarity with Apache is already pretty strong among perl programmers: you're not going to talk many of them into trashing their web-server performance for the sake of ideological purity.

I agree. Especially where Apache is concerned. I don't know a Perl guy who doesn't like Apache mod_perl...