Perl is definitely bipolar in this respect -- I've never had an easier time of dealing with Unicode issues than in Perl, but I've also never cursed Unicode so much while dealing with it in Perl.
Python has native support for unicode strings, not Unicode support in native string types. Sigh, this is where it gets into bs world, because you have to figure out how to convert back and forth appropriately. Just thought I'd share my recent frustration.