pc88mxer,
With regards to the N blocks, your hypothesis sounds valid. With regards to the virtual API, I was actually thinking of turning it into an iterator. Calling the iterator without any parameters would fetch the next X bytes where X is some default. You could then allow for named parameters to fetch forward by Y, rewind, select a range, etc. It should have gone into the TODO but wasn't really necessary.

With regards to Perl 6 and applying a regular expressions on streams - the answer is yes unless things have changed since last I looked.