That would help for range, but I think there's a fundamental signal incompatibility. The IrDA output is probably put out by dedicated hardware (UART with IrDA encoder) so the baud rate would be fixed at 115kbps or whatever the rate is for the newer fast IrDA. The pulse shaping and encoding are quite specific and likely incompatible with remotes.
If the Ir was generated by just a gpio pin from the cpu then the pulses would be completely programmable but would anyone want to load their CPU like that for the sake of 70 cents in parts?
