I know that. I'm Italian, and Western European Languages can be expressed on a 1-byte character type. I also understand that the performance gain of 1 byte char was significant. But now is 2014 and not to have to wrestle with encodings definitely worth the performance and (somewhat) complexity hit.

As a unrelated (to Python) example of the encoding nightmare: have you ever tried to import text from CSV files generated on different OS/locales in Excel that don't support Unicode-encoded CSV files? It can be made, sure... but, man, if it can be avoided... ;)