Larry always thought so. As he explains in whatever Apocaplypse explains given/when, the reason Perl hasn't had a switch statement is that everyone else's switch statements suck, and he preferred to have none rather than a bad one.

Given that the language was being overhauled completely for Perl6, he took the time to do it in a way he considers right. Indeed you will notice that the semantics of Perl6's given/when go quite a way beyond those of switch in most languages, both in terms of possible conditionals and of non-/fallthrough behaviour.