I think you're fundamentally confused about how computers work. It is always faster to do things in software than in hardware. Naive optimizations are always faster than data flow analysis from profiling. More layers of indirection make things faster, so the fastest languages put interpreters inside of their interpreters. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The kids are getting smarter.
I blogged about this on my use.perl.org/~scrottie blog. Perl's supply lines have been cut: grade school language courses don't teach it; those teach Flash, Squeak, and other things. High-school age hackers go for things like PyGame. College classes teach Java or Microsoft technologies, depending on who they're getting money from (sadly). Only a couple of Universities still teach Scheme as part of SICP. Self-taught Web programmers go the low road of PHP or Ruby for the high road. There are companies that use Perl but the work tends to be maintenance (which no one wants to do) or else they hire small, crack teams of experienced Perl programmers, not bothering with trying to invest in novice or intermediate programmers.
Perl launched to fame by being able to talk to a bunch of databases and being easily (for the time) bindable to binary libraries, as well as having great low level access to the OS, as well as being a direct upgrade path for sed, awk, bash, csh and so on. Now people don't care about upgrading old shell scripts and don't understand awk's idioms, sadly -- everyone wants yet another C, and every other language talks to the various databases and binds to C libraries just as well plus have better toolkits for creating games.
Perl 5 is dead in the sense that COBOL is dead: all of the work is maintenance work; there are no entry level or intermediate positions; experts can still find work and will be able to for a long time.
Perl 6 does lots of great stuff but that alone isn't enough. Without a PyGame, Rack, and lots of other pieces, it's just a neat language design. Whether Perl 6 kicks ass very much still depends on where people take it. In a very real sense, Perl 6's success depends on me. I need to port Continuity to it (and its native coroutines!). I need to take more features from Seaside and show them off. I need to play with SDL stuff and make good abstractions. Busy, busy, busy!