It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration.
You just did to Perl exactly what your article complains about re: PHP.
Maybe. I actually like Perl a lot, and there are lots of things you can do with it that you'd never want to use PHP for. The difference is that in the world of web development (and this is the crucial distinction here), Perl has neither the use cases nor the easy uptake nor the development frameworks (Drupal, Joomla, Zend, CodeIgniter, etc.) that PHP has. And so my comment wasn't against Perl tout court.
That said, I am indeed among the people keeping my fingers crossed for a Perl renaissance in web development.
And now I'm doing some research and finding Catalyst and others. Looks like there's more going on in Perl web dev than I realized. Foot.in.mouth.