I've yet to see a distribution that doesn't offer perl. Some include it as part of their developers packages. Some offer it as its own item. Some don't allow you to deselect it, because it's considered vital to the system.

I remember seeing some polite discussion on the subject of removing perl dependencies from Debian, where the conclusion was essentially "fergetabodit".

I occasionally toy with the idea of developing an intentionally perl-centric linux distro (probably Debian or Ubuntu based), tentatively named "Oyster".

The idea would be to have the ultimate perl-development linux-distro available out of the box, without hunting around for the pieces. There's also a lot of cool mod_perl-based web apps out there (Bricolage, Slash, etc) that could be glued together into a websever version of Oyster.

And for extra credit, we could look into things like re-writing that mess of init shell scripts as a monolithic perl script (I bet it would boot a lot faster for laptop use).