Think you can't do it with Perl? The group of Perl hackers at the Perl/Linux Project is working on a full distribution of Linux written entirely in Perl. Although probably not the best choice for production systems, it's an interesting project nonetheless, and worth checking out if you're a Perl junkie. Looks like they're looking for future developers as well.
Complete Linux Distribution Written in Perl
Complete Linux Distribution Written in Perl
I would just settle and support replacing all the sys admin shell scripts with perl and put perl in the /sbin dir.