It's hard to for many at least in the United States to use é or other words with explicit accent symbols due to the way our keyboards are set up. I have mine modded to use shortcut keys to make them, but that's more than what most would ever want to deal with.
As a European using the extended latin alphabet, setting your keyboard up to easily type é, is easy: use a modifier key. Then, for example, MOD + ' followed by e becomes é. Similarly you can make à, ô, ĩ, œ, ů, and so on. I even believe this is the default setting (as I cannot remember setting it manually).
But I agree that if you don't use these characters, setting it up to type one or two odd characters isn't worth the hassle.
That's sort of why I have them as well. I used π or µ as a variable constant before in a script I was writing or use ² and ³ in documentation for something.
