Yeah, I read that one a while back and I completely disagree with it. It sounds kind of like this to me:
the Perl vm is pretty good for a vm and it might take a little effort to write a better compiler, so perl's perfect again, so yeah, move along. what do you mean that doesn't make any sense? well, you obviously don't know what you're talking about. See this function? it's fast in perl. If I poorly write a c-equivalent, it's slow. So why don't I write it well? because perl is good. Perl rox0rs.
The end.
It's very possibly to write a native compiler for Perl that would produce faster, more efficient code. Nobody seems to want to do it though, probably because they don't want to deal with the negative response from the community. So instead they focus on the next-gen scripting languages.