I'm attaching for convenience two small applications: one with AWT TextArea and another with JTextArea.
Use jdk8 b92 or something close to this.
Running any of this applications on Linux (I have Ubuntu 12.04), you will observe uniform behavior pressing and releasing keys with English (standard US) or e.g. regular Russian layout: all three KEY_PRESSED, KEY_TYPED, and KEY_RELEASED are coming in due order.
However if you switch to US alternative international layout with dead keys and press for instance ` and e, you will get e grave (good) but no KEY_PRESSED neither in AWT nor Swing and no KEY_TYPED in AWT.
Apparently input method handler does intercept KeyPressed and swallows it, posting InputMethodEvents.
Perhaps this is non-issue: we live this way with Oriental languages without complains -- but asymmetric behavior in AWT and Swing may be fixed, I hope.