I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example.

Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank.

Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point.

As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. Actually one can make them for free, but with my app back then I just felt it might be good to pay someone who is more skilled at writing to do it.