I deliberately hid the information about the used interactive
interpreter; just to show you the "experience" of new Python
user. (This is what I'm showing to potential Python devs who
are interested in this tool; I know Python and use it since
v. 1.5.6 as a non computer scientist).

The interactive interpreter was:

Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 12 2011, 15:08:59) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>> 

In that precise case, it was Windws 7 Pro (Windows 7
Professionnel, in French because of a Swiss French version)
and IDLE is just the IDLE an end user see after a fresh
installation.
I can ensure you, such a behaviour exists / existed on all
Windows versions I used (from Win98, win2000, ...) with all
the Python 2 versions since the unicode introduction.

The technical reasons/aspects: "sys.defaultencoding",
non iso-8859-1 chars [#], *non working unicode literals*,
sys.stdout.encoding = 'cp1252' and so on.

[#] For those who do not know, one can not write text
in French with Latin-1.

Please do not take my aggressive (I recognize it), but sometimes
necessary message badly.

IDLE is not the cause, I use here IDLE to show as an example the
disaster of code containing *unicode literals*.

I'm not really happy to see this mess again in Py3.3 [†]; the key
point beeing *unicode literals*.

The Pandora's box is opened.

[†] In fact, I will somehow never see or suffer from it. Decisions
have been taken.

jmf