Stephen J. Turnbull writes: 
The exception is the proposed console changes, because there you *do*
perform all I/O with OS APIs.  But I don't know anything about the
Windows console except that nobody seems happy with it.
I'm quite happy with it. I mean, it's far from perfect, and when you look at discussions on Stack Overflow regarding Unicode on Windows console, almost everyone blames Windows console, but I think that software often doesn't communicate with it correctly. When Windows Unicode wide APIs are used, it just works.

Adam Bartoš