So, basically, if I understand, Perl has both awk and sed built in.

Yes, as per what I read long ago, Larry Wall created Perl as a sort of superset of parts of awk, sed, shell and C (maybe not shell).

absolutely shell. Perl acts as glue between multiple processes very nicely. $foo = `foo_command`; is great. Opening named pipes. Python is more awkward because it's less like shell.

Thanks, didn't know that about Perl.