Is it considered as a good practice to pick Unicode string over regular string when coding in Python? I mainly work on the Windows platform, where most of the string types are Unicode these days (i.e. .NET String, '_UNICODE' turned on by default on a new c++ project, etc ). Therefore, I tend to think that the case where non-Unicode string objects are used is a sort of rare case.  Anyway, I'm curious about what Python practitioners do in real-world projects.
Additional to Mihails comment I would say: Use Unicode, since it is the future. In Python 3.0, Non-Unicode will be gone, and as much I know, all the "U"-Prefixes will make trouble, since they are also gone.
Should I use Unicode string by default?