VS & Sharepoint - A Good Match?

I've been working on the preliminary stages of a web app for the past few weeks. While I was working on that, something came up and my department obtained a copy of Visual Studio 2010 and our organization announced that we could pilot our project on Sharepoint 2010.

I'm told it may be easier to develop the application using Sharepoint, and that may be true. However, I've already got a jump on it in Microsoft Web Developer and plan on now using VS 2010. Surely there has to be a way to export the project from VS2010 to Sharepoint?

If that's the case, which method is better - a "Sharepoint App", or writing the App in VS2010 and running it within SP.

The website will have several listboxes that contain data from queries run off our Oracle database.

I just want to know if this "Sharepoint App" our IT guys speak of is even possible, and if it is, which is the preferred method.