If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols, it'll be difficult for them to deal with lots of math and physics where this is the standard notation. Intuitively it feels that the best thing that the language can do here is to enable notation that is the closest to the underlying math.

> If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols

After using Character map or other "user friendly" methods to enter Greek letters as symbols on a computer, i would say, yes, people struggle with the use of Greek letters. Unless, of course, one has a Greek keyboard.