I conffess that I didn't follow the utf-8/surrogate discussion.
But the utf-8 encoding can encode all valid unicode characters:

UTF-8 may only legally be used to encode valid Unicode scalar values. According to the Unicode standard the high and low surrogate halves used by UTF-16 (U+D800 through U+DFFF) and values above U+10FFFF are not legal Unicode values, and the UTF-8 encoding of them is an invalid byte sequence and should be treated as described above. (from wikipedia)

If we encounter surrogate halves when encoding (unicode) to utf-8, it means that we are really trying to decode utf-16 and reencode it as utf-8.  (and that python is using 16 bits for its unicode chars).  the utf--8 codec should be smart enough to merge the surrogates into a utf-32 char, and encode that.

Anyway, as you remark, my approach is a _patch_, designed to make python (2.x) work in an unicode environment, with the least amount of code change, for those willing to commit such a patch.  In 3.x you may want to do things differently.