The oral is potentially no joke, indeed, but it mainly centres on the questions which you failed to answer right in the written exam.
And if you do it all
in the USA you are very unlikely to get some of the, shall we say, situations which used to happen here in the UK.
Get your ducks in a row while still over here (the
process is not hard), with the written exam, the medical, the visa/tsa stuff, and it will be a well oiled process out there, and you end up with a license which you can keep for the rest of your life and which nobody in Europe can take away from you.
Later you can attach the FAA IR to it, which is recognised one way or another in most of the world and even the anally retarded protectionist EU is bound to give some conversion route / credit for it.