I can only agree with you -- after a couple months of using perl (it became a regular, highly valued piece of my toolbox by now) my impressions are very similar to yours.

I would add just two more things that helped me a lot:

The willingness to use constructs you don't fully understand

It's usually considered dangerous, but hey -- it took me some time to get perl's idea of reference right. I needed \@a and \%h prior to that ;-)

And more important...
A deadlined project to write in perl

Okay, the deadline part is not necessary (tho' it really helps ;-)), but you definitely need to sit down and start coding something bigger than funny one-liners, involving file i/o, lots of hash & array mangling, possibly objects, definitely modules...

-mk