I know I'd read about svk before, but it must have slipped through the cracks in my brain. Back when I was installing subversion I saw that there were perl bindings, and today I got around to looking for Win32 binaries of them, and found them on the svk wiki. SVK looked interesting so I installed the 1.06 package, which also installed it's own version of perl (in it's own subdirectory of the install directory), with some libraries (also in the install directory), including the SVN::* perl libraries. I went ahead and copied the libraries to the ActiveState perl library directory, and they seem to work fine (though all I've done so far is write a very simple script to tell me the last revision).
I haven't gotten to play with either svk or the SVN::* modules yet, but I have some ideas for some Tk utilities I'd like to write. I'm intrigued by svk, as one of it's features is a smaller checkout directory (since there's no ".svn" directory), and the directory I'm checking out is 250MB (w/a 250MB ".svn" directory), so that would save a "bit" of disk space. But then I suppose I couldn't use TortoiseSVN for the checkout? I'm a bit confused, as I read that you can use Tortoise with svk, but maybe not for that function? I dunno.