It's been more than five years since the project started. A long time indeed. Between then and now, many world events have taken place: the Asian tsunami, the London bombing, the 2004 Olympics, the emergence of blogsphere, AJAX, etc, etc.

A good and relatively new starting point to learn more: http://planetsix.perl.org.

I hope the team is not aiming for a perfect language, because that'll take too long to attain or is simply unattainable.

No, that's Perl 7. Perl 6 is being designed as a development basis for it, thought to evolve naturally into it...

I know there's Pugs, but until an official implementation is launched, Perl 6 is still vapourware.

The future of Pugs is uncertain, and not necessarily in a negative acceptation of the term. AIUI, now it is indeed an unofficial implementation, but even if it is optimized for fun, it is a concrete basis for Perl 6.

And thanks to Pugs Perl 6 is here today. It's only a

$ sudo apt-get install pugs
[download]

or

$ sudo prt-get depinst p6-pugs
[download]

away, to anonymously name two osen/distros I'm somewhat familiar with: YMMV, but not too much!

Would it be too much to be hope for a first release by the end of 2006?

For 6.0?!? AFAICT, yes, it would be too much. But then what I can tell is not much. No big harm done, as I wrote and most of us already know, Perl 6 is Here Today.