-1
I see encoding as the process to go from text to bytes, and decoding the process to go from bytes to text, so (ab)using these terms for other kind of conversions is not an option IMHO.

Anyway I think someone should write a PEP and list the possible options and their pro and cons, and then a decision can be taken on python-dev.

FTR in Python 2 you can use decode for bytes->text, text->text, bytes->bytes, and even text->bytes:
u'DEADBEEF'.decode('hex')
'\xde\xad\xbe\xef'