> Can a company issue a press release talking about their products or business without it being an ad by your standard?

I think you've lost sight of what we're discussing.

We're not discussing the morality of press releases, what we're discussing is a THIRD PARTY media organization reading from a script and re-showing video footage sent to them from a company without declaring that they're doing so. It is the repetition without source-context that is the sin, not the original company's media publications.

So are Microsoft's press releases about the XBox 360 ads? Yes. Is that wrong? Absolutely not. The "wrong" is a different media company taking that content and repeating it verbatim without declaration or contextualization (e.g. quotation marks).

If money (or other benefits) changed hands between the company benefiting and the media company reporting, that only compounds the immorality of it.