[amathprof]

Yeah, the original design philosophy of AsciiMath was to make that input symbol something in ASCII that looks kind of like the desired symbol. The idea of supporting Unicode as an alternative is reasonable idea and probably one we should look at (feel free to make a pull request).

[devereaux]

I see unicode as both an alternative rendering for text based devices, and an alternative input (because on my keyboard, the right Alt key followed by a gives me α, which is faster than typing alpha)