And do you want a job in our support department telling our thousands of Windows users how to install a C compiler, nmake, configure CPAN, and install the necessary modules they need/want?

Thousands of Windows users who want to program in Perl.

It's not totally out of line to suggest that Perl programmers on any platform learn to manage a C compiler. (I could see an exception for programming students.)

Vanilla/Strawberry don't take that complexity away -- they just provide the compiler and other tools and pre-configure everything so it just works. They also include upgrades to a bunch of 5.8.8 core modules to provide better Windows support out of the box.

It's packaged and standardized complexity instead of complexity that every person frustrated with AS has to figure out and solve for themselves.

If you're talking about Windows end-users of a program written in Perl, then I would imagine the better solution is using PAR or something to package everything they need rather than relying on them to install Perl itself and get necessary dependencies from CPAN or PPMs.