Benefit of running custom query over views
Not really. you should stick to using Views; it will provide you more benefits. To name a couple:


Less custom code to maintain; it's one of the mostly heavily used modules and will be part of D8 core. There's much less worries of security holes, bugs, etc.
The versatility of the Views features: caching, multiple view displays, filtering, a UI to change all this, etc.


I'd say the only exception to this would be the instances where your query is going to be hit very often, in which case you'd might be able to squeeze more performance out of an optimized SQL query.

For your needs, a block of 10 latest nodes, views will do everything you need it to, not be a burden on performance, and will take much less time to complete than creating &amp; maintaining possibly bug ridden custom code.