Q:

Is there a unix-like system that doesn't come with Perl?

As far as I know, every desktop/server distribution of Linux has Perl (and core modules) installed by default, AIX and Solaris (IIRC) also do. 
By "by default" I mean that even the most lightweight variant has it.
I haven't worked on BSD or similar ones, do they come with Perl?
Motivation: I'm trying to figure out if encouraging people in my team to use Perl instead of awk/sed/other text utils would make sense. 
Note: Which is the most portable of sed, awk, perl and sh? does't answer my question. Portability it's not my main concern here, availability out of the box is. Even if all unix-like systems have awk/sed I would still prefer Perl.
Note: also, by Perl I mean Perl 5.8+ 

A:

Yes, if you mean available as an ordinary third-party application rather than being bundled as part of the operating system.
FreeBSD dropped Perl from contrib back in 2003, in version 5.0.  It's in ports/packages, of course.
This is also the case for NetBSD and MirBSD (a.k.a. MirOS BSD), for FreeBSD derivatives such as GhostBSD and TrueOS, and for FreeBSD fork DragonFlyBSD.  FreeBSD fork MidnightBSD has retained Perl in contrib, however.
Further reading

FreeBSD/i386 5.0-RELEASE Release Notes.  2003.  The FreeBSD Documentation Project.

A:

Cygwin:
https://cygwin.com
Does not include Perl in the Base install. It does have a Perl package available in the official mirrors. As you may suspect many packages pull it in as a requirement, like Git.

A:

Having worked with both sed and awk I can say I breathed a sigh of relief when going to perl.  sed and awk is fine for one-liners, but as soon as it gets a bit more complex I will turn to perl due to better error handling and a more powerful language. With perl I also avoid having to deal with different dialects of awk.
The only systems I have met in practice that did not have perl installed was my router and my Android phone (and it was trivially easy to install perl on those). Even all *BSD machines I have been on had perl installed. So while some BSDs may not have perl as part of the base system, all the system I have met in used in real life had perl installed - possibly because they had packages installed that depended on perl.

