With the version I now have of AE, yes, I can import the whole Premiere project. But before I upgraded, I couldn't. I had to do rough cuts in Premiere, and then I would render out small sections (uncompressed or with Huffyuv, so that all the swapping around wouldn't eff up the quality) that I wanted to work with in AE...render back out afterwards and then back into Premiere. Kinda tedious, but I'm good at making things tedious ;) Really, since I was only using AE in spots, it wasn't all that awful.

Your questions aren't clueless! I wondered the same things. AE's learning curve is a lot steeper for me that Premiere's was, but I have to learn new stuff or die of boredom...I think I'll be working through AE tutorial books for quite a while :)