• It won't contain the word CPAN (Andreas did offer the use of CPAN.pm provided there was some backwards compatibility, but many people feel the name is poorly chosen).
• It will be a top-level name (to protest top-level names in general, talk to p5p not me ;)

The meaning it will attempt to capture is beyond the scope of the Net:: modules. More time is probably spent determining if you have the Net:: modules than using them... At any rate, CPANPLUS is aimed more at module management than just fetching.

/me is staying out of this entire quagmire of naming and will just call it CPANPLUS until it gets another name...

Ps. To comment on sauoq's post: CPANPLUS does allow you to fetch modules from your local file system. I can't say about CPAN.pm since I don't use it.