Yeah. The thing that blows my mind is that the guy who runs Input Club (they make/design keyboards with open-source firmwares) sent the USB consortium an email a year or so ago asking if there were any plans to update the USB HID spec for unicode, and the response indicated that he was the first person to ask! Really?!? Unicode was out for a few years before USB even existed, and nobody'd even thought about it before? You'd think at least the word processor industry (which wasn't nearly as homogenous back then) would've jumped on it.

For those of us who use programmable keyboards, it's not a problem at all.

For everyone else, perhaps it should be seen as an editor problem? There's no reason vim can't see that you type != or =/= and replace it on the fly with ≠.