Module::Build is now part of the Perl core, as of perl 5.9.4 or so. There are vague plans afoot to ship 5.10 some time this year, but as the perl5-porters are all volunteers, finding the necessary time to smoke out errors it may have is the hardest part. But it will be part of the standard distribution in the future.

I don't see what problem you have with skipping, especially if not doing so means you wind up with failures in the test suite because other users don't have the same setup as you. Just skip and be done with it. Either that, or specify them as prerequisites in the configuration (whether it be M::B or EU::MM so that they get downloaded beforehand).

I have recently taken over the maintenance of a couple of Win32-specific modules that were designed to be built with Module::Build. As it turns out, ActiveState doesn't bundle this module in its distribution, so the first thing I did was to switch back to EU::MM, so that if other people want to hack on it, they don't have to download Module::Build beforehand.