Jonathan,
In addition to the discussion by Asmus on your points, I
would like to mention that Murray Sargent is presenting a paper
on "MathML and Unicode" at the International Unicode Conference
coming up in September in San Jose. In that paper he will
be discussing MathML (a specific mathematical application of
XML), which addresses the issue of mathematical presentation
(and content) you were raising. (He mentions Unicode plain text and
Unicode TEX approaches to math as well.)
As Asmus suggested, one of the big problems of any proposal
to add specific markup as characters (whether you call them
"presentation suggestion" characters or something else, the
intent is the same), is how their presence in plain text
interacts with explicit markup languages at a level above.
It is generally not a good idea to introduce such elements as
characters because they blur the line between text content and
text markup and create contentions and inconsistencies between
information at one level and information at another. And that
translates into complex, buggy software and opportunities for
data loss and corruption.
--Ken
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