Holy fudge cakes! As a college student majoring in computer graphics, I must say that is astounding. My upcoming class will require me to recreate a comic book cover in Macromedia Freehand (I know, it stinks, and they've been bought out by Adobe so Illustrator lives on and Freehand doesn't, but that's what we got at college).
EDIT: As for wasting time, I must disagree. Once in vector, you can make the image as large as you want without losing quality. Try that with a raster image. Plus, vector prints nicer, much nicer.