obviously a compiled language would run faster than a script

It's not obvious to me why this is the case. It's also not (quite) obvious to me why people think that Perl is interpreted and Java isn't.

Perl's biggest shortcoming is that it's so efficient, you can often get your job done before you stop to think about the "right way to do it".

Perl's scalability depends on how you do it. I'm sorry this answer isn't more meaningful, but it's a meaningless question. (Is a hammer scalable?)

Perl is only a love-hate relationship for people who don't yet grasp the subtleties that Real Programmers (to be elitist) encounter every day.