lualatex vs pdflatex- char encoding issue not fixed by suggestions found in CTAN etc

[William F Hammond]

Ulrike Fischer writes in part:

> Many things have changed in between, e.g. utf8 is now the default in
> latex and latex properly supports the unicode engines.

Alas, with TL 2017 I'm also not up to date.

Just to be clear, I think you are just saying that
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} is now invoked automatically
rather than something more exciting.  And *without further
arrangements* the user will see in print whatever unicode
characters are handled in the T1 font encoding (therefore,
95 printable ASCII characters plus 128 T1 characters).
Do I have this correct?

And is it still correct that there is no access to open type
and truetype fonts without using LaTeX in a not-yet-default
engine?

Thanks.

                              -- Bill