I thought that was the purpose of having binary strings and unicode strings in Python. That's how I've been using them anyhow. Unicode for anything whose text property is relevant (u"this is text") and binary as a simple container of bytes ("bf9@cf0*1!09v$j#x0j").
Yes, I think that's a good start, although the literal notation for the computer strings b".." is a bit unwieldy. They also don't coerce when used together, see my comment above.
