I'm not sure what those guys mean by "sprayed". It's probably a minor language difference. There are a few different ways to put color on vinyl. I have a couple of machines that thermally burns an epoxy (or wax) ink into the vinyl. It's relatively permanant and can stand up to 3 to 5 years of full UV exposure. There are other machines that use special solvent based inks to dye the vinyl (this is what the automotive wraps are done with). These machines are very expensive (the machine that did my bow graphics is what would be used to do car wraps and is a $400,000 printing press!). Krylon (or any spray paint) adheres well to vinyl and is useful to do low cost fades and effects. There's really nothing special about "car wrap" vinyl other than the machines used to color it are usually very large scale and very expensive. The vinyl is pretty much the same stuff used on the smaller scale stuff. For solid color graphics, it makes sense to use layered cut colors of vinyl instead of using an expensive printing process.
Practically any vinyl adheres very well to hulls and mylar sails. It will adhere acceptably to Dacron sails as longs as they are pretty clean and you use a high grade vinyl. Premium vinyl will adhere to a spinnaker but it's heavier than the spinnaker cloth itself...so it's not really advisable to put vinyl on a spinnaker.
Most spinnaker graphics you see are airbrushed (I don't know what kind of ink/paint they use). The companies that do spinnaker graphics typically will cut a paint stencil on a special low adhesive vinyl, apply the stencil to the spinnaker, then air brush in the color(s). Once dry, they remove the stencil.
Scooby, that graphic is simple enough that I would probably recommend simplify it a little more by doing a solid drop shadow (or removing the drop shadow - it doesn't translate well when viewed from the reverse side) and doing it in layered solid color vinyl...it's a little more labor intensive but it's much cheaper than printing.
That brings up another point...think about what the graphic will look like from the reverse side of the sail. If you want it to be completely legible, consider putting the graphic on a large neutral color rectangle so that the opposite side will not be largely affected by light coming through the sail. If the graphics are to go only on one side (which is usually the case), the side you want to put them on has to do more with the kind of racing that you do. If you primarily do buoy races, I recommend putting the graphics on the starboard side of the sails because most photography is made from the outside of mark roundings. If you're doing a coastal race (like the Tybee 500), put your graphics so they face the beach more often (port side in this case). If you're just putting the graphics on one side or the other, think about the layout to see what they will look like from the opposite side. While you don't want to worry about them being fully legible (because the text will be reversed), try to lay them out so they can at least be read. If you have multiple colors, the way the vinyl is layerd can keep it from being read from the opposite side at all.
P.S. I've never heard of "laser cut" vinyl. All cut vinyl is usually done on a machine with a rotating razor blade that has it's pressure adjusted so that it only cuts through the vinyl and not the backing paper. Once cut, someone manually goes back and removes the vinyl not needed in the graphic (process called "weeding") and then applies an application mask tape over the whole thing to maintain spacing when the backing paper is removed for application.
