I think the only people that really obsess about perl6 are the people working on it, the people testing it

Who are incidentally the people who (should) now it best ;-) (OK, that's a stupid point - they know it best because they are exited about it ;-)

That being said, I see that parrot constantly progresses, and that the other virtual machines (like jvm and dotnet) don't really have the same target audience.

Yes, they are moving towards supporting dynamic languages, but it's not the same as if the VM were designed for it from ground up. Just compare the CPU time for taking a continuation. It's a bit like saying Cygwin is a competitor for full-blown Unix implementations.

Actually the closer competitors are (IMHO) various VMs that were designed for executing lisp. Funny thing that nobody writes about those in the popular tech blogs.