Oof, at the risk of... interfering with the book, but that's another of the topics I enjoy.

The equivalent of the use of "sein" ("to be") in English isn't completely unknown or hasn't disappeared. The most common expression would be "something is gone". Well, with a certain meaning it's just an adjective, and when you want to be more specific, you can, of course, say "something has gone". But there's still traces of the present perfect being expressed there.

Oh, yeah, so I have to defer to my own grammar book, according to which (well, I know it myself, but rather implicitly), perfect tenses are used with "sein" when it has to do with movement or transformation (plus some special cases, like "bleiben", "passieren"): "ich bin gekommen" - "I have come", "Was ist passiert?" - "What has happened?", "Er ist gestorben" - "He has died".