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Brett: As for "writing Unicode to an ASCII file system":
there is no such thing. POSIX file systems accept arbitrary
bytes, and don't interpret them except by looking at the
path separator (in ASCII).

So you can put Latin-1, KOI8-r, EUC-JP, UTF-8, gb2312, etc
all on a single file system, and people actually do that.
The convention is that bytes in file names are interpreted
according to the locale's encoding. This is just a
convention, and it has some significant flaws. Python
follows that convention, meaning that you can use arbitrary
Unicode strings in open(), as long as they are supported in
the locale's encoding.