Last night I read the open source perl6 book and played some with it. It definitely looks different and more expressive compared to the languages in the same league - perl5, python and ruby.
Changes to regex and rules & tokens make pattern matching pleasant. Grammars bring formal parsing to mainstream. The perl6 OOP way looks promising.
But on the other hand, the status page doesn't say anything meaningful - http://dev.perl.org/perl6/status.html. The wiki shows timelines only till 2007 - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?when_will_perl_6_be_released
I can't find any information about using existing cpan modules with Perl6 or a replacement; I did stumble upon a mailing thread about perl5to6 conversion tool or something.
So, overall, what's the time-frame we are looking at when perl6 can safely be used for a new project? It looks like north of 2 years to me.
One of my client projects needs an object serialization and indexing mechanism, a (stronger) HTTP library, a file-based cache, and a wrappers for a couple of POSIX functions for me to port it from Perl 5 to Perl 6. As it's a project for a client, the opportunity cost for writing those libraries themselves has been too high to justify porting to Perl 6.