I'd only call this anecdote, but one or more benchmarks assert that cl-ppcre, common lisp's perl-compatible regex implementation, is faster than any other, include perl's.
The larger question I'm intuiting from your post, "Why doesn't language power make a difference in practice?" I don't have an answer to.
Depends on your definition of "make a difference in practice". If you mean "make the language become one of the dominant ones", yeah, that doesn't seem to have happened. Either Lisp is less effective in the large than one would expect from its power, or it's less powerful in practice than people think, or power has almost no relation to language dominance.
But if you mean "make a difference to the user", well, it lets the user more easily write the program that the user wants to write. In practice, that makes a difference - to that user.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf