To answer your question: yes it would be perfectly possible to bake the textures like that if you use a light source in Away3D or Papervision3D. However, 3D IDEs will be able to bake textures with a lot more detail including shadow cast by other objects and some advanced settings.

Take a look at an interesting experiment by Fabrice Closier from the Away3D team: http://www.closier.nl/blog/?p=80 He doesn’t bake textures, but does create a normal map in Flash based on the mesh, which is a bit in the same spirit.

http://www.infiniteturtles.co.uk/blog/away3d-multimario – Collada animation in Away3d

http://blog.r3c7.net/?p=216 – another animation example in Away3d
http://blog.r3c7.net/?p=160 – Collada animation in Papervision3d
(both post are in Japanese, but the demos are definitely worth seeing)

It was my guide some time ago in my first attempt to import 3d objects from Blender to Pv3d. I wrote a small note on that here: http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/01/from-blender-to-papervision3d/

@dave While I did not try this so far, I am pretty much sure that baked textures can be applied to a mesh that is animated afterwards and exported into a Collada file.