[1] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#text-... [2] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/howto/unicode.html
One of my favorite things about Python 3 is its new string handling. It is fantastic and marginally more intuitive. Having an explicit (and a more general) immutable `bytes` class, no longer sharing a base class with `unicode`, and having Unicode instead of a potentially-encoded string as the default are all wonderful decisions and moves Python forward by miles in my opinion.
Until Python 3 becomes the norm, we're still stuck with the confusing `str` and `unicode` constructs.