The intent is to print every line entered at the console until a blank line is entered.

so, you could exit isn't it ?
or you could decide to continue with something else to do and in that case , you're right a last is better suited, but that was not the purpose. my code was from a one-liner test

perl -pe '/^$/ && exit'
[download]

which produce the expexted result and become

perl -MO=Deparse -pe '/^$/ && exit'
[download]

before I post it :-)