And then imagine trying to escape telnet on an international keyboard (Swedish in my case). Telnet actually kind of works, if you press ctrl+altgr+8 (which is one hell of a hand-twister), but many games and GUIs ONLY allow you to press the listed, with no other modifiers.

So many games don't even allow you to open the console, because they assume that your key next to 1 is ~, and so don't work for § (next to 1) or altgr+¨ (the layout's ~). Or switch between looking at characters or scancodes depending on the context, and thus work in some cases but not all.