There's a lot of CPAN activity, but my impression is that a lot of it seems confined to only a handful of problem domains. There's tons of choice with date libraries, or OO frameworks, or unit test frameworks, but other languages have solutions for that too.

For all the talk of CPAN being so killer, there actually isn't much there that other languages don't also have. There may be more choice in implementation of a fairly common concept, but that's the Perl way. The "aha, I'll use Perl because this CPAN module implements exactly what I want, and nobody else does" moment rarely happens.