Perl is not designed to be as fast as possible on computers. It's designed to be fast enough on computers, and as fast as possible on the human writing the program. Sometimes using a strictly compiled language will save CPU time compared to a Perl alternative; sometimes not. The Perl program, however, will almost always be easier to write, debug, maintain and extend. And Perl itself is written in very fast C, so the speed hit is not as hard as you might think.

Regarding your CGI example, there are ways to avoid the performance hit of spawning a new interpreter for each request; mod_perl is the most popular.

Finally, your comment about "other better options are out there" seems to indicate you have your mind made up already...