The scrambler's actually a separate block, usually immediately before or shortly after the encoder. It's common in wireless modems, which I'm more familiar with

The scrambler's actually a separate block, usually immediately before or shortly after the encoder. It's common in wireless modems, which I'm more familiar with, but it seems like it's rare in wireline PHYs. Ethernet apparently uses an 8b10b encoding to maintain a similar number of 0s and 1s. I can't speak on entropy, but turbo codes use an internal interleaver and the codewords can be quite long, so a short repetitive input sequence turns into a very random looking output sequence. As you mentioned though, two identical input sequences would still map to identical output sequences.