Well, they have codepoints, but not unique ones (since they can be written both using combining characters or using the compatibility pre-combined form). Software libraries dealing with unicode strings needs to handle both versions, by applying unicode normalization before doing comparisons.

The reason they have two representations is for backwards compatibility with previous character encoding standards, but the unicode standard is more complex because of this (it needs to specify more equivalences for normalization). I guess for languages which were not previously covered by any standards, the unicode consortium tries to represent things "as uniquely as possible".