I believe the droid has an infrared transmitter/reciever, but it uses it to detect when the phone is placed against your face. It's rather small and I doubt that it will be able to be used for controlling TV's or sending data. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Back in the "good old days" (when Palm was relevant), many SmartPhones and PDAs had IrDA ports so you could "send" your contact information, pictures, etc to other users would could receive such. (Some laptops also had IrDA ports for syncing information). But like serial ports and Parallel ports this has become pointless on today's phones. The one drawback of this is you lose this ability to use these phones as a remote for anything that isn't on your network. For example if you had a TV that is connected through your router, then yes, you could do it through Wi-Fi (and there are a few apps in the marketplace for doing such things), but not like you could in the old days of the Palm devices.