[XeTeX] biblatex with xelatex

[Alex Hamann]

Hi,

I am used to encoding my bib-files and tex-files in utf-8 and typesetting them with xelatex. While skimming through the biblatex documentation I ran into a paragraph under section 2.4.3 (p. 36):

Using UTF-8 encoding in both the tex and the bib file is not possible since neither traditional BibTeX nor bibtex8 can handle multi-byte encodings such as UTF-8. In this case, you need to use a single-byte encoding such as Latin 1 (see above) or resort to Ascii notation in the bib file:
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage{biblatex}

I never saw any problems resulting from the use of utf-8 in both files and am now curious to understand why I should avoid doing this. Is the limitation something that becomes irrelevant when using xelatex (xelatex is not mentioned in the documentation)? 
Can anyone enlighten me?

TIA

Alex