> Er.  What does this mean for those of us who are used to plain old ascii, or
> using a hardware terminal?

Nothing. Plain english just works.
If you want to use the German localisation for texinfo, you'll have to choose
a UTF-capable terminal type and font though.

Btw, not all l10ns are in UTF-8 yet, some still use ISO-8859-* or some
other encoding; here's the list:
cs.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2\n"
da.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
de.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
de_AT.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
eo.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii\n"
fr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
he.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-8\n"
hr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2\n"
ja.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=EUC-JP\n"
nl.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
no.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
ru.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r\n"
sv.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\n"
tr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-9\n"
zh_CN.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=gb2312\n"
zh_TW.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Big5\n"

I hope we'll get our own libiconv sometime....

Cheers,
 Thomas (not subscribed, thus the late answer, sorry)