A couple of comments: The IrDA format can be viewed as comprising two levels. The first level is the physical encoding scheme (i.e. how the bits are represented by pulses of IR). The second, "protocol", level defines how those bits and bytes are arranged into packets of data and the significance of each data field to the sender and receiver.
My guess is that what the folks at C&W/TWT have used (or, strictly speaking, misused)is the first, physical, layer of IrDA. I doubt that the C&W Pace remote control fully implements the complete protocol layer of the IrDA specification.
That said, there is no real hardware barrier that would prevent the typical universal remote transmitter from sending pulse trains which resemble the IrDA physical layer. (With one exception, which I'll get to later.) More likely, the problem learning remotes have with this code is that to them it appears to use both a very high frequency and a complex formatting scheme which sends several different packets of data for each key press. Either or both of those are usually sufficient to throw any learning algorithm for a loop.
So, in my opinion, the advantage the One For All product has is that it is upgradeable, i.e. once the engineers figured out how to "hard code" the C&W format, it could be directly loaded into the remote without a need for any intermediate learning step. I'm not sure that this bodes well for the Pronto hopes, though.
As last word, the one hardware aspect of IrDA that I'm sure One For All doesn't replicate is the infrared wavlength. IrDA devices (Pace included) use an infrared wavelength of 880 nM. All normal consumer electronics devices use 940 nM. It would be dumb for One For All to build a remote equipped with 880 nM IR diodes when everything in their world uses 940 nM. Since 880 and 940 nM are not THAT far apart, the usual symptom of using the wrong wavelength is a small to moderate loss of range. It will be interesting to see if users of the One For All notice any difference realtive to the original equipment remote.
