Then again by becoming fluent in Perl you to some degree pick up *NIX knowledge. Or at least you get some exposure to it.

Perl internalizes a good bit of "The *NIX Way" to do things (e.g. file and directory handling, large bits of the POSIX API, the socket API) and by learning to use Perl you're going to look at problems through the prism of that philosophy (pardon me while I run my metaphor through this wood chipper over here a couple more times . . .). Granted while lots of Wintendo specific things don't exactly fit into the same conceptual framework (driving stuff through OLE, for instance) or work as well (processes and fork() versus a thread based model) the underlying basics translate fairly well.