PHP and Unicode

I learned PHP from an old O'Reilly book, and regarding Unicode it said "PHP's strings are always encoded in UTF-8." Since then I never gave it much thought, though I see a lot of ranting and wailing about lack of Unicode support in PHP. I also see a bunch of articles about work-arounds and fixes and good things to come in version 6. Meanwhile I've been messing with a bunch of Chinese and Japanese text in PHP 4 and it seems to be working just fine. What am I missing? Are all these rants just old, am I lucky, or what? I imagine I'm just not understanding the whole thing, and I would really appreciate somebody pointing me in the right direction.