Gtk2 has similar ease of adding tooltips to any widget:

my $tooltip1 = Gtk2::Tooltips->new;
my $tip_text1 = 'Just Another Exit Button';
$tooltip1->set_tip($button, $tip_text1, undef);
[download]

and it's not really that much harder in Perl/Tk. The real difficulty with balloons comes, when you need to dynamically change them at post time.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#by Jack D.
# Just attach the balloon to the widget itself instead 
# of treating it like a canvas item. 
# The script below shows both.
## Example ##

use Tk;
use Tk::Balloon;
use strict;

my $mw=tkinit;
my $c=$mw->Canvas->pack;
my $l = $c->Label(-relief=>'sunken',-text=>'embedded window');
$c->create('window',150,150,-window=>$l);
$c->create('text', 150,100,-text=>"A Text Canvas Item",-tags=>'TESTTAG
+');

my $ba = $mw->Balloon(-background=>'yellow');

$ba->attach($l,-initwait=>0,-balloonmsg=>'Attached to Widget');

$ba->attach($c, -initwait=>0,
       -balloonposition => 'mouse',
       -msg=>{ 'TESTTAG'=>'A Canvas Item'}
);
MainLoop;

__END__
[download]