Incidentally I don't know about your version of CPAN, but VERSION 1.76_01 has references to a module called Mac::BuildTools, so it looks like more recent versions of Perl and/or OS X have noticed the stupidity that you did and made sure that Perl comes with a basic toolkit that will make simple installs (like HTML::Template) work without make.

Afraid not. Mac::BuildTools does pretty much what you think, but for MacPerl (the Mac OS port of Perl) not perl under Mac OS X.