[yes_or_gnome]

I have to disagree. All but 3 of those pictographs are already in the Unicode standard. You have to patch fonts because A) your preferred font may not have them and B) to make certain that the font meets Powerline's expectations.

The ones that are "unique" are a bit annoying because they replace defined characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane - Private Use section(E000-FFFF). Even though the section is "Private Use" it is often already defined by your OS's system font. There's the Supplemental Private Use Areas A (F0000-FFFFD) and B (100000-10FFFF) which can be overwritten safely.

I scare quote "unique" because two of those characters are full-height arrows; one right-pointing, the other left-pointing. These are already defined as u1F780 (🞀) u1F782 (🞂). It may be the case that some fonts that the triangles either A) don't actually go from floor to ceiling, or B) they have empty space behind their hypotenuse.

The only truly unique character is the "git branch" pictograph. Maybe, someone could write up a convincing argument to include it, but I can't imagine one. It's not a symbol you see to often even in the git community. And, I would bet if you looked hard enough, there's some mathematical symbol that would be suitable.

Just FYI, I've used powerline fonts daily for the past ~3 years.