Royal icing can be used as cake decorator cement or as a phenomenal element of decorating a cake. It dries hard as cement.
Buttercream, depending on the recipe can taste massive yummy or sucky!
The roses from everyone with the Wilton instructions, it will taste sucky, but looks great!
I've never had anyone ask me for RI as opposed to a real buttercream.
You never go to Michaels to buy icings. You go to Michaels, to buy cake pans that are massive expensive and you have a coupon.
Hope I helped!
Royal Icing is used for decorations and drys hard (kind of like a candy cigarette if your old enough to remember those...I'm showing my age). You can tape a figure to the bottom of a clear piece of plexiglass and tape wax paper to the top. Outline the figure on the waxpaper side, let it dry, and then transfer to your cake. Buttercream is a decorator's icing. Depending on the consistency you make it, you can use it for icing your cake, making decorations such as flowers or frozen buttercream transfers, or if you mix it to a thick consistency you can use it as a "dam" to hold in cake fillings.
edited to add: Buttercreams are pretty simple to make, so I wouldn't buy one. They usually don't taste very good. I would just try some different recipes until I found one I liked. You can find many good ones on here (indydebs and tonedna's are good ones) or you could google search it.
Hope that helps
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