I couldn't agree more with all your points, especially your first one:
There's two projects - the Perl 6 language and the Parrot VM. The more ambitious project, in terms of implementation, has always been Parrot.
This is exactly why i think the Pugs project is so important, because it decouples these two projects from one another. It makes no sense for Perl 6 (the language) to have to wait until Parrot (the VM) is done before it can be implemented. These two tasks are natural canidates for parallelization in my mind, and IMHO the Pugs project is doing exactly that.
