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The input builtin always uses "strict" error handling for Unicode conversions. This means that when I enter a latin-1 string in a utf-8 environment, input breaks with a UnicodeDecodeError. Now don't tell me not to do that, I have a valid use-case. ;-)
While "strict" may be a good default choice, it is clearly not sufficient. I would like to propose an optional 'errors' argument to input, similar to the 'errors' argument the decode and encode methods have.
I have in fact implemented such an input method for my own use:
https://github.com/stefanholek/rl/blob/surrogate-input/rl/input.c
While this solves my immediate needs, the fact that my implementation is basically just a copy of bltinmode.input with one additional argument, makes me think that this could be fixed in Python proper.
There cannot be a reason input() should be confined to "strict", or can there? ;-)

There's no reason you couldn't write your own input() function in Python to do this.

I am not quite sure how I would write a custom, readline-using input function in Python (access to PyOS_Readline seems required), that's why I did it in C. Have an example?

> There cannot be a reason input() should be confined to "strict", or can 
> there? ;-)
Actually, there's a good reason: in the non-interactive case, input() simply calls sys.stdin.read(), which doesn't have encoding or errors attributes. You want to override sys.stdin so that it has the right error handler.
However, there is a bug in input() in that it ignores sys.stdin's error handler in interactive mode (where it delegates to the readline library, if present):
>>> import sys, io
>>> sys.stdin = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdin.detach(), "ascii", "replace")
>>> sys.stdin.read()
héhé
'h��h��\n'
>>> input()
héhé
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
If you don't mind losing GNU readline functionality, the immediate workaround for you is to use sys.stdin.read() directly.

Here is a patch. The bugfix itself is quite pedestrian, but the test is more interesting. I did what I could to fork a subprocess into a pseudoterminal so as to trigger the GNU readline code path. The only limitation I've found is that I'm unable to read further on the child's stdout after input() has been called. The test therefore uses a pipe to do the return checking.

> The bugfix itself is quite pedestrian, but the test is more interesting.
Indeed. Looks good to me.

Thank you Antoine, this looks good.
However when I try your example I get
sys.stdin = io.TextIOWrapper(
 sys.stdin.detach(), 'ascii', 'replace')
ValueError: underlying buffer has been detached
</helpforum>

> However when I try your example I get
> 
> sys.stdin = io.TextIOWrapper(
> sys.stdin.detach(), 'ascii', 'replace')
> ValueError: underlying buffer has been detached
Which version of Python (and which OS?). It works fine here on latest
3.2 and 3.3 branches.

This is with Python 3.2.2 on Mac OS X 10.6 (SL). I have built Python from source with: ./configure; make; make install.

Python 3.2.2 (default, Nov 4 2011, 22:28:55) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys, io
>>> w = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdin.detach(), 'ascii', 'replace')
>>> input
<built-in function input>
>>> input()
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: underlying buffer has been detached

Oops, the last one wasn't meant for the bug tracker. <blush>

I can make it work at the interpreter prompt with your patch applied. Sorry for cluttering up the ticket. ;-)

> I can make it work at the interpreter prompt with your patch applied.
> Sorry for cluttering up the ticket. ;-)
That's ok, thanks a lot for testing.

New changeset 421c8e291221 by Antoine Pitrou in branch '3.2':
Issue #13342: input() used to ignore sys.stdin's and sys.stdout's unicode
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/421c8e291221
New changeset 992ba03d60a8 by Antoine Pitrou in branch 'default':
Issue #13342: input() used to ignore sys.stdin's and sys.stdout's unicode
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/992ba03d60a8 

Committed. I hope the test won't disturb the buildbots.