My main concern is what the developers thing of having another
hard-wired dependency to third-party software, iconv in this case.
Yep, that would be a problem. though current implementation means that if iconv isn't there, it will simply not encode- it won't break.
standard libxml bails if iconv is not there. I did run into that problem on earlier MacOS X systems (10.2 and newer is ok)
However you can get around this by doing ./configure --without-iconv when you compile libxml. It probably has some replacement function.

Now to the stupid question. What is iconv doing at all and why do we need it?  
Also if libxml has a replacement function for systems which dont have it, can we simply rely on libxml for solving it for us?
iconv is GNU's character conversion library and it supports every imaginable encoding - unlike libXML who's interface only exposes a very llimited set of character encodings, and its use is also far from being trivial.
 
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Oded Arbel
m-Wise mobile solutions
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