UTF-8 support by default

Hello,

are there any plans of making pdftex work with utf-8 characters by default?

I know, that there is XeLaTeX, which claims to support utf-8 by default (which is only a claim, but not the entire truth).

The reason for asking here is, because I think it would be nice to have the default tool offer everything needed for writing a text document. The current situation puts the user in need of understanding encodings first.


Regards
Chris