Cloud Foundry lacks support for running arbitrary commands. Being able to run arbitrary commands is essential when processing data outside of the web application request-response cycle. "run" is essential to perform tasks like Django's admin user creation (and changing its password) or populating a database from a Twitter stream.
The appeal of ActivePerl and ActivePython is obvious when you're running business applications in an exclusively Windows environment. There are other distributions of Perl and Python available for Windows, but none with a vendor like ActiveState backing them up.
ActivePython users on Linux or MacOSX may have noted that the arrow keys do not work properly in the command-line Python shell. When you hit up-arrow in the shell, ActivePython gives you "^[[A". This is because ActivePython does not include GNU readline due to licensing restrictions.
