Are you aware about Perl's command switches?

Yes, but the optional implicit outer loops in Perl are different from the implicit outer loop in Awk — Awk's syntax is built around its implicit outer loop, using PATTERN-RULE pairs, while Perl's implicit outer loops are purely for convenience. I have always just written an outer loop explicitly even in one-liners.

do I want to install awk and sed on Windows?

Unless you already have them, perhaps from Cygwin, possibly not. That is a fair point — on Windows, the Perl startup/shutdown overhead is (probably still) dwarfed by the system startup/shutdown overhead for each process. I kicked Windows out of my personal LAN years ago, though, so I usually do not think to consider its inadequacies. :-)