Does the Grease Pencil Tool create Vertices? I wonder, it would appear from the demos showing how to use the tools that the points from creating grease pencil lines and fills basically behave like vertices. 

So could I treat those points like vertices, that I can use all the tools and modifiers the same way as using vertex from shapes?
I hope I understand your question correctly... It seems like you want to convert your grease pencil to vertices?! When you convert Grease Pencil to geometry you can select path, bezier or polygon curve... It will convert it to curve stroke which you can convert to mesh object, and then you can apply all the modifiers you want...