First of all let me thank everybody for his/her input.
My intention though was not to start a complicated thread, so please people do not fight over this question. I think each of you provided interesting and valuable feedback!
The application is to provide termination voltage (3V) to a bus used with both TTL-type drivers and also so-called "active negation" drivers. Think of it like similar to the DDR SDRAM, or more exactly like SCSI-3. The input to the regulator is always 5V.
One such bus termination "regulator" is made by Fairchild (FAN6555), as I just found out in the weekend. The problem with this is that it seems nobody else makes a perfect replacement, so it's a single source. Philips and National have variants of this "DDR bus termination reference", but support different pinouts and currents/inputs.
I specified "single IC" just because I want to keep down the number of components (cost, MTBF, etc). It's true that following either IRStuff's or Lewish's approaches I can achieve my design goal, depending on how you look at the problem.
Thanks again to everybody. Let me know if by any chance you stumble across an exact equivalent of the FAN6555. And yes, we are all engineers, even (or especially) if sometimes we try to use crowbars as screwdrivers.