Hans Aberg writes:

 >   Incidentally, this touches on a LaTeX question: What about LaTeX and Unicode?

nothing -- no issue -- no problem, except that it would make some
parts of the current kernel unnecessary (ie 8bit support)

if you think a bit about it then this isn't a question of LaTeX but
first of all a question of the underlying program TeX which is 8bit.

There is a unicode version of TeX under development which is called
Omega and LaTeX does run under Omega.

frank