I think I stumbled onto the solution, partly due to the teddy bear principle, partly due to the answers from ikegami, toma. and quester.

I think I was reading the documentation for vim a little incorrectly. The docs state:

-T {terminal} Tells Vim the name of the terminal you are using. Only required when the automatic way doesn't work. Should be a terminal known to Vim (builtin) or defined in the termcap or terminfo file.

Late last night I tried passing that argument with a known good termtype (xterm) and lo and behold, it worked!

To bring this 'round back to the perlish solution (and in case anyone in the future runs into this), this is accomplished with the following modification:

  my $vim = Text::VimColor->new(
    string => $perl,
    vim_options => [ qw( -RXZ -i NONE -u NONE -N -T xterm ) ],
  );
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(Where qw( -RXZ -i NONE -u NONE -N ) is the default for vim_options, as according to cpan::Text::VimColor).

And for the record, I'm using vim 7 - perhaps (inferring from quester's reply) vim 7 handles the need for a terminal differently.

s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)
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