We have experimented with building an Android app in a hackathon last year.

This was using Perl for the "Activity" and importing the native Java modules - blogs.perl.org and youtube presentation

This would work best if we implemented a Perl module. Calling Android APIs directly was a bit messy.

Note that you can also run the real "perl" on Android - perl dist and blogs.perl.org

Another experiment was with an HBase table scan for some bigdata project.

These projects all used pre-compiled Perl to Java. Precompiled Perl can be potentially faster than "perl" - specially if you use typed variables.

The new thing in this release is that it can execute Perl directly, without precompilation - and it also executes BEGIN blocks and eval-string. Java applications can also "embed" Perl if there is a need for scripting.

Also maybe some company that is migrating to Java can keep using Perl, instead of rewriting.

tl;dr This is still new and I don't have a clear idea what it will be used for.