Yes, releasing Perl as Perl 7 without renaming the failed experiment at yet another end-all-be-all language would indeed be confusing, scary and pointless and it would help nothing without updating pages with information about that ugly overdesigned overcomplicated behemoth with the new name so that they do not come up in searches for "perl" and confuse the heck out of people with incompatible syntax.

The only thing that makes any kind of sense is a public announcement that "Hey, guys, we tried to create a new version, but ended up creating a new language. Lets fix the fsck up, give the new language its own proper, separately searchable, name, skip a version and go forward."