Indeed. It appears that's exactly what they plan on doing.

"BARCELONA—AT&T Inc. said it is considering a way to let the providers of mobile services pay for the cost of the data traffic associated with things like streaming movies and smartphone applications, opening up a new round of debate over the rules of the mobile Internet. "

AT&T May Try Billing App Makers

Supposedly they are: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/its-official-steam-coming-linux

Imagine if, along with bundling Opera with the Wii, Nintendo FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY game to be approved by Nintendo before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.

Funny how nobody complains about game consoles, network appliances, or any other propriety electronic device being a closed platform. It's only evil if Apple does it?

In ksh93, you can print unicode characters with printf:

$ echo ${.sh.version}
Version JMP 93t+ 2010-03-05
$ whence -v printf
printf is a shell builtin
$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 printf "\u[00AE]\n"
®

For Unix shell scripting purposes (and I know the Slashdot crowd may scoff at this but), nothing compares to KSH. It has many features not found in Bash and most other shells, such as coprocesses, associative arrays, compound variables, floating point arithmetic, discipline functions, etc. It's also fully extensible and posix compliant. For GUI scripts, almost all commercial Unixes include dtksh, which provides access to much of the Xt and Motif APIs. A TK version of ksh also exists.

KSH just gets a bad rep because Unix vendors insist on only supplying an ancient version (ksh88), or its clone (pdksh) that lacks all of the functionality and behavior of the original. As a result most people have never used a modern version of the shell.

Of there's a right tool for the right job. Depending on the nature of the task one might also want to consider perl, python, or some other scripting technology.