I personally believe that while it is certainly true that CPAN is one of the major points of strengh for Perl and similarly important are the communities, you're stressing too much the accent on tools as opposed to the basic language itself, which is the starting point for the latter ones, and everything else.

I'm with you on this one, but I'm wondering whether the complete context of the talk might make the approache(es) mentioned so far more applicable. If the talk is "How to survive..." and the audience is people who've already decided to learn Perl but are bewildered at the tool choices, then listing resources and tools is entirely appropriate. On the other hand, an introduction to Perl for those interested but not yet crying for help would be much more profitable (IMHO) if it centered on the language itself.

A friend of mine tells his junior administrators, "The most important thing about Unix is experience, but it doesn't have to be your experience: learn from mine!" I think that applies equally well to Perl. Demonstrating Perl's elegance to people generally piques their interest better than anything else will. Showing how simply Perl solves a real problem is a great segue.

Along those lines, clear, non-obfuscated Perl is also a great hook. Perl can be very ugly and still run, but it can be beautiful too. Showing Perl's pretty side can really surprise people who've heard the horror stories of write-only code.