[delayclose]

"Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly."

I just press the ä key.

[gnosis]

You can do that with LaTeX too. It will take a bit of configuration first, but once you've got it configured you can type Unicode characters in to your source and have them interpreted as LaTeX commands.