How can I embed the gallery in my theme (w/o using [gallery])

Hi,

I am using the 2.5+ gallery feature to build a portfolio site. It’s working great, but I find myself having to constantly add the [gallery] shortcode to the post. That would’ve been fine, only since my layout requires the gallery to be decoupled from its description, I find myself having to write my description in a custom field (instead of in the post area where it can also enjoy the benefits of the wysiwyg editor).

What I am asking is whether there’s a way to embed the gallery in the theme itself, and then I can have something like (pseudo code):

<div id="post-description">the_content()</div>
<div id="post-gallery">the_gallery('&shortcode_arguments')</div>

This can be really helpful, but I realize (I have searched for it a lot) that it is not an existing feature yet. Is there another, possibly lower-level way of achieving a similar result?

+If any of you core developers read this, it seems to me this feature as a template tag would make a lot of sense.

thanks,

Mushon