The key problems we want to work around are user and web host aversion to CGI and intense complexity and persistence of mod_perl. Imagine if this is all you needed to add to Apache before you could throw any file with a .pl extension into your web root and that's it, you're off and running Perl:
LoadModule perlite_module modules/mod_perlite.so
AddType application/x-httpd-perlite .pl
AddDirectoryIndex index.pl
This we can sell shared hosting providers on. mod_perl we unfortunately cannot.