Alas, it's still a ridiculous situation. Not counting the various work-arounds using modules from the Win32/Win32API namespace (tye and ikegami usually give answers involving Windows-specific code, see Super Search), you can use Path::Class::Unicode and PerlIO::fse for reasonably portable code.
Comment on Re: Windows NTFS UTF-16LE File-Operations
Looking at the code of Path::Class::Unicode, it is broken at least on some non-Windows operating systems (well, actually on some filesystems). It seems to assume that all file systems will export their entities as UTF-8, which is a fairly broad assumption given VFAT and NFS, which only since v4 in 2009 makes claims on the encoding.