What's better - a good soundhole pickup or built-in pickup?

[giantslayer]

Or is one better than the other? I am just curious because, from my experience, most acoustics don't sound very good plugged in unless you drop some serious coin on them (e.g. taylors and martins). Obviously, the quality of the acoustic tone is a huge factor as well, and that's almost always true for more expensive guitars. However, I also suspect that the expensive guitars have substantially better built-in pickups. It looks like you can get a decent soundhole pickup for $150-200.

One reason I'm wondering is that I have an acoustic guitar that sounds good, but doesn't have a pickup in it. I wonder if I could get a nice acoustic tone through a PA by using a soundhole pickup with it (as opposed to most <$1000 guitars I've heard through the PA) or if I really need to get a $1000+ guitar to get a good acoustic signal. Right now, I don't have money to do anything, so this is more of a hypothetical.

P.S. I also understand how much a good DI like an LR Baggs can improve an acoustic's tone. I run sound and have probably seen half a dozen or so acoustics plugged into the LR Baggs DI, checked the settings on the box, and handled the signal myself. All the ones that didn't say "martin" or "taylor" on the headstock didn't sound very good (some sounded awful) and/or had annoying spikes in the response somewhere.