I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Perl would opt for the POSIX api, even emulating it where the native was (by my definition:) better--but I was.

What still surprises me is that POSIX still specifies a less useful default behaviour.

Thanks for telling me about the system( 1, ... ) trick. Is that documented somewhere?

I've been using  use threads qw[async]; async{ system ...; }; for that for a while now, but that is nice if not portable.