Does that mean it might be included in the next version of Ubuntu?

I'll try (Intrepid is due by the end of October) but first it must be included in Debian, and that will be after Lenny release on September. However, there's some work going on in Debian because Alien::WxWidgets, Wx, et al. have been already included.

I think it would be better if it was just called 'padre'

Maybe it'll be possible, since it's an editor, not just a Perl module. The libfoo-bar-perl is the convention for Perl modules in Debian (it's awful, I know), but there are some exceptions and this should be one of them, indeed.