No, my work has the exact same problem.  Actually, this bug report has
confirmed for me why heapq could not be imported when I accidentally
forced all open text files to use UTF-8.  I just have not gotten around
to trying to solve this issue yet.  But since importlib just uses open()
directly it has the same problems.

Since it looks like TextIOWrapper does not let one change the encoding
after it has been set, some subclass might need to be written that reads
Looks for the the stanza or else immediately stops and uses the expected
encoding (UTF-8 in the case of Py3K or ASCII for 2.6).  That or expose
some C function that takes a file path or open file that returns a code
object.

But I have bigger fish to fry as my attempt to get around open() being
defined in site.py is actually failing once I clobbered my .pyc files as
codecs requires importing modules, even for ASCII encoding.