Of course you can -- but at the same time you ditch tens of years worth of muscle memory and habits. Also the physical buttons don't correspond to the characters anymore, which can be irritating when trying to remember where that one damned seldom-used sigil was again. Also it's a pain in the ass to have to switch constantly between layouts, if you want to write some non-code text in your native language that uses characters that are not present in the US layout. (Btw. for what it's worth, I use customized Dvorak layout that contains all the characters I use when coding, typing English and Finnish. But I'd imagine most of us won't go that far to actually customize their layouts.)

I think having to remap your systems keyboard to something other than your native language in order to use an editor is a bit unreasonable.

Typing accented characters is far easier in Spanish with a Spanish layout, that we all grow up with. The software shouldn't just ignore half the planet on the basis of "use English".