I am using Perl on VMS quite regularly (perhaps an average 4 or 5 days per month. I would guess it has to do with the fact that you usually don't call exe files directly by their name on VMS, but almost always through a symbol (something similar to an environment variable) pointing to the exe file. Quite probably, $^X knows the symbol name, but not the exe file behind. I'll try to test this when I get to work.

Update: Actually, I just tried, on our VMS platforms, with Perl version 5.8.6, $^X contains the full name, including physical path, exe extension and even the version number: 

ROL>sh symbol perl
  PERL == "$PERL_ROOT:[000000]PERL.EXE"

ROL>sh logical PERL_ROOT
   "PERL_ROOT" = "$1$DGA3501:[SYS0.SYSCOMMON.PERL5_8_6.]" (LNM$JOB_834
+94F40)

ROL>perl  -e "print $^X, qq(\n)"
$1$dga3501:[sys0.syscommon.perl5_8_6.][000000]perl.exe;1

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In reply to Re^2: A mapping between perlvar and %Config ? ( $^O $Config{osname} $^X $Config{perlpath} ) by Laurent_R
in thread A mapping between perlvar and %Config ? by szabgab

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