From...
http://www.rice.edu/projects/Blaffer.../venetian.html
...comes...
"In a famous anecdote, Vasari recounts Michelangelo's comments after visiting the studio of Titian, who was in Rome for a brief sojourn in the mid-1540s: Michelangelo supposedly praised Titian, 'saying that his coloring and style pleased him very much but that it was a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning.'"
More on this neverending debate can be found in that website as well as in...
http://webexhibits.org/feast/context/venetianart.html
Drawing is indeed a wonderful art. But painting can be an art unto itself.
"LINES DO NOT EXIST IN NATURE. What you interpret as a line is the place where two areas of different color or tone come together, and your imagination supplies the line between them." - Hereward Lester Cooke, then Curator of Painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (quoted in his classic work, "Painting Techniques of the Masters", which does, however, recognize the power of drawing, at least in the hands of certain artists).
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "Art is as art does."