That's a very good distinction to draw. If you want the sort of utility that the OP stated, then apart from an IR, IMHO you need access to instrument approaches as well as an aircraft with the appropriate capabilities.
That said, I have landed on short grass runways in my SR22 and it handles them OK. That said, as RT implies, most of my flying is between hard runways with instrument approaches as it isn't possible to guarantee the level of despatch reliability I want otherwise.