Actually audreyt did present a version of pugs once that parallelized meta operators, with measurable speed difference between single core and dual core (not quite a factor of 2, but somewhere around 1.7 iirc). I don't know if "mainstream" pugs does it, though.

I agree that it's hard to keep faith, but recently something helped me a lot: I played with grammars in Rakudo, and found that 1) although they are still limited, they work quite well and 2) it's really easy to parse stuff for which you'd normally write a recursive descending parser. (And I'll blog about it later this week). Now I firmly believe that they will be one of the killer features of Perl 6, even if concurrency might turn out not to work as well as promised.

I don't think that you'll see a working, usable Perl 6 level concurrency implementation within the next year, though.