As I see it, if your car had a stock ram air snout that was in front of the radiator, then YES you could build a better snout and stick it in the same place as stock. You can't add a snout where there wasn't one before, you can't move the intake snout from the inner fender to in front of the radiator, and you can't run your new and improved snout outside of the stock location in front of the radiator to the leading edge of the bumper.

I'm not aware of any manufacturer that has a ram air "outside the car pickup". At that point, we'd be talking about a ram air snout protruding out of the bumper into the on-coming air stream... is this what you're talking about? Something that protrudes from the vehicle's silhouette? All the ram air that I've seen either had a hood scoop for the "pickup point" or some sort of snout behind the grill or headlight bucket and in front of or beside the radiator.

Again, the way I find it easiest to think about it is by visualizing the point in space where the air initially goes into the stock intake system. THIS (a point in space) is where the "stock location" is, IMO.