One of my goals for Perl 5.14 that I’ve discussed with Jesse Vincent and Andreas Koenig is getting CPAN.pm to be able to bootstrap itself in a fresh perl installation without relying on external command line tools or FTP. LWP is too big a distribution to bundle into the core, but HTTP::Lite is a focused little module that provides everything needed. (cpanm bundles HTTP::Lite already)
I’ve just finished some work to add HTTP::Lite support to CPAN.pm and Andreas has merged it into the master branch. The next step will be to test it out in a development release. If all goes well, the plan is to merge the latest CPAN.pm into the Perl core and bring in HTTP::Lite as well. Then, finally, a mere 20 years after the invention of HTTP, Perl 5.14 will be able to speak HTTP out of the box and bootstrap access to all of CPAN.
Keep your fingers crossed.