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I don't think Turing-completeness implies any issues when converting programs between equally powerful automata. In fact, a lot of results in the theory of automata / early computational complexity take a form of converting all programs of machine A -- in fact the machine itself -- in order to run it on machine B.

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Please take a look at the following comments thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466, in particular at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662 where Massimiliano Gubinelli (one of the main TeXmacs developers) explains the issue.

In theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there often is. TeX's syntax itself being Turing-complete means you can barely start to do static analysis on the code before hitting a wall you can only get over by installing a huge fraction of the ~1GB download that is TeXLive. "Being theoretically possible" is in no way orthogonal to "impractical in many or most circumstances".

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