there has been some discussion a while ago concerning utf8 support for LaTeX
and as a result there has been some code development to provide utf8
support via inputenc. I would add something like that to the next latex2e
release.

this is kind of beta, but perhaps one or the other might want to give it a
try. it can be found at

http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/utf8ienc.zip

there is also some inputenc support to allow inputenc chars being used in
math (should be used with elatex)

http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/inpmath.zip

best
frank