> and Python3 not operating on bytes by default is a mess.

I'm not arguing that it's not, but I don't how your examples support your point. Would you please explain how your examples show that "strings are unicode" is broken on Python 3?

FWIW, here's what I get:

Python 2:

    >>> import sys, locale
    >>> print(sys.getdefaultencoding())
    ascii
    >>> print(locale.getpreferredencoding())
    UTF-8
    >>> print(sys.stdout.encoding)
    UTF-8
    >>> print(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
    utf-8

In Python 3, the only difference is:

    >>> print(sys.getdefaultencoding())
    utf-8