The TOR network is a network: you can access it using any web browser and the TOR client + a local web proxy. Use Chrome and configure it to use the local web proxy, now you're accessing TOR using Chrome.
The Tor client is the software which runs the 'onion routing' part. This provides a local network port which is your wormhole into the network; this is called a SOCKS proxy.
The TBB has the Tor client and a browser (a slightly tweaked Firefox) configured to connect via the Tor SOCKS proxy rather than via the standard network.
I was disappointed last time I booted up TBB to see they had security by default set to 'Low', which enabled lots of unnecessary stuff, like javascript on for every site by default. Too many content parsers trying to do stuff with untrusted data. Its pretty poor.
Do you have any links you can share to best practices for setting up this secure TOR client instead of using the insecure TBB as explained above?
[1] https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en