Firstly, and most importantly, follow the Planet Six news aggregator. Perl 6 weekly meetings and blogs from the lead developers and many members of the community are included, and it's a great way to keep up on the progress of Perl 6.
To get an idea of how Rakudo Perl, the leading Perl 6 implementation is doing, check out the Perl 6 Advent Calendar. Every day shows a different facet of Perl 6, and the extent to which it has been implemented right now by Rakudo.
Perl 6, as a specification, is still undergoing constant refinement and refactoring. Some examples of where the spec is unclear: the object hierarchy, what should and should not be part of the core library, date handling, laziness, 'auto-threading' of junctions. But the bulk of the language has been finalised. The spec is very ambitious, and IMHO is one of the major reasons why Perl 6 has taken so long to get going.
In terms of implementation, the leading project is Rakudo Perl 6, built on top of the Parrot VM. There are perhaps a dozen dedicated developers and many more who are helping test, write libraries, code and documentation. Most development work is funded by grants from the Perl Foundation and community, so there is no reason to expect it to peter out.
Rakudo has plenty of bugs and plenty of missing functionality. It has only recently undergone a huge refactoring - the 'ng' branch. Browse any existing Perl 6 source and you'll find plenty of comments saying "Rakudobug" or "Rakudo doesn't yet implement this..."
Even so, this paints an unfair picture of Rakudo. The Perl 6 specification is ambitious to say the least. The language has such an insane number of features that it has taken implementations years of development to get to the level they are at today. Rakudo is certainly complete enough for people to have written text-based games, wikis and other web applications in, and it's getting better every day. Developers have written around 40,000 unit tests for Perl 6 so far, so it's easy to see improvements in the implementation (Rakudo currently passes ~30k tests, or 79% of the test-suite)
The first "usable" (stable) release of Rakudo is known as 'Rakudo Star'. It is currently planned for Q2 2010 (April-June). The general idea was to implement a large portion of Perl 6 - not the whole language, but a useful subset of it - and minimise bugs. As for production ready, Perl 6 has always had a release date of "Christmas". Perhaps this Christmas, more likely something else. It's going to be a long time before you can use the whole of Perl 6, bug-free, but we're at least going to see a stable release very soon, and hopefully the hype for Perl 6 will snowball from there once people discover that it's real.
If you are interested in Perl 6, you might consider getting involved in the community. From my experience it's a very friendly community (it almost creeps me out how nice everyone is, even on IRC). Install Rakudo, try to break it, file bugs. Write testcases. Write implementations for core functions, write modules. There's plenty to do!