You'll forgive me for not taking someone else's word for it. That's not to say that you may know far more than I how difficult it is, but until I've looked at the issue and seen that it's not worth the effort, I am a dyed in the wool skeptic.
While the browser can likely convert html entities to binary-streams, I am pretty sure the opposite doesn't happen. Case in point -- here. Why would the browser, browsing a site that identifies itself as windows-1252 interpret user characters as Unicode and convert them into HTML-entities representing the unicode characters?
Second issue on that -- I've never seen any of my browsers do that on any other site. Though they can convert the entities into a binary stream. But again -- why would the browser convert the html entities into UTF-8 encoded Unicode if the website's encoding was directing conversion.
My claim is that for entities above the ASCII range, those entities will be converted into UTF-8 to be display in the browser. Case in point -- pi. It's character code is not in windows-1252. The browser converts the entity to UTF-8 -- not windows 1252, which is why I believe the fix is relatively trivial.