1. The test did "name: '{{hostnames}}.{{item}}'" inside a with_sequence
loop, which didn't do what was intended: it expanded hostnames into
an array, appended ".1", and set name to the resulting string. This
can be converted to a simple with_items loop.
2. Some of the entries in hostnames contained punctuation characters,
which I see no reason to support in inventory hostnames anyway.
3. Once the add_host failures are fixed, the playbook later fails when
the unicode hostnames are interpolated into debug output in ssh.py
due to an encoding error. This is only one of the many places that
may fail when using unicode inventory hostnames; we work around it
by providing an ansible_ssh_host setting.