Virtual fonts tricks can't be the correct solution. The correct solution is to use a font format that can handle >256 glyphs, such as OTF. This is what heirloom troff does.
Failing that, it is not clear how much you want to hack up tex versus just going along to get along. For Latin alphabets, the Plan 9 tex iso has an extra style file called 'unicode.sty' that does some serious latex heroics to trick latex into interpreting UTF-8 byte sequences as their corresponding Latex equivalents. Russ
