I stole some code from Emacs::PDE which does it with pod2man and woman.el , this solves most issues.

I also try to avoid the console and use eshell inside emacs instead, perldoc works there flawlessly.

A third option might be to load the raw POD code and to switch to pod-mode. (didn't try this yet)

I didn't start this thread because I don't have workarounds, but because I think that there should be a drop in replacement such that the logic and bindings in cperl-mode continue to work seamlessly.