Actually, one of the points that I tried to make is that the amount of situations where you have to do that is remarkably small. You don't code a word processor every day. And, if you do need to do that, and you need to support more than a single language, you're talking about a rather complex, probably slightly fuzzy, major feature.

I bet the MS Word team that made internationalized search/replace spent a lot of time getting it even somewhat right.