I recognize parts of IPA, but I frequently forget the sound of some characters, and can't reproduce arbitrary IPA with confidence. I think if you haven't learned it properly, and use it regularly, its somewhat impractical.
Mandarin is an interesting example. I found Pinyin really intuitive (as an English and German speaker), and once you get used to some quirks (like x vs sh, or q which is more like english "chi" than english "qu", or i and e that sound much more schwa-like than I'd expect), it is fairly easy to pronounce most words (provided the tone marks are indicated. Official signage in China usually omits them for some reason).
And I know the difference between transcription and transliteration, that's why I put transcription in scare quotes. What I mean is, lets pretent Irish words are not written in Latin, but in ... Lotin (which looks 100% like Latin but is completely different :-)), and then treat it like Cyrillic. I have less problems reading Russian or Arabic or Greek names, compared to names writen in other Latin-alphabet languages - because most transliteration schemes try to preserve at least some familiarity for west European language speakers (unless it is Klingon, or Wade-Gilles...).
Wikipedia already has a respelling key for this purpose. English orthography is such a mess, though, that I wouldn't trust a machine with this task. And even a human can't get around the problem that many pronunciations simply can't be expressed in “respelled” form, because they violate the rules of English phonology. That doesn't necessarily mean they're hard for English speakers to pronounce, but it does mean that trying to spell such words as if they're in English will get you nowhere.
And that's before we get to the issue of different accents!
> can people please start "transliterating" names from languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways
No. Transliteration doesn't exist to make words from other languages pronounceable by English speakers, it exists to express a word in a different script. Focussing on English speakers would sacrifice important nuances, like maintaining phonological distinctions English doesn't have, or the ability to convert back to the original script losslessly. For example, Mandarin Chinese has at least two different consonants that sound like “sh” to an English speaker, and at least four that sound like “ch”, but the distinction between these is critical to Chinese speakers, and if we “transliterated” them to just “sh”/“ch”, we would end up with large numbers of homographs, and the transcription would be useless to Chinese speakers.
Also, what you're describing is the job of transcription, not transliteration.