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We use SearchRev at our agency but only have it implemented for some of our accounts.  Speaking from the perspective as an account manager, thumbs way up.  It simplifies bidding and improves performance slowly over time.  And saves a lot of time on bidding.  Wouldn't recommend using Google's internal bid management because Google is trying to maximize their own revenue, not my client's performance.  We've tried Google's maximizer tool and the results were not favorable. 

Trade off is the cost of bid management software.  Typical fees are on a % of ad spend so it cuts significantly into the bottom line of the agency.  But for most accounts, especially ones with high CPC, we trust bid management tools more than human management. 

I love, love, love Google's interface!  It's great and gives plenty of options.  What I *don't* like is when you have a client that is across all of the 3 major search engines, and the other two are seriously lacking in features to help improve campaign performance.  There's pretty much nothing you can do to optimize the campaigns.

I like "playing" with Google manually, but where I run into trouble is when I want to do something "advanced."  For example, my sales on an account may be slow from 1-5pm.  I don't want to "pause" during that time, but I'd like to reduce my bids by 30%.  That's the kid of functionality and flexibility that I'm looking for in a tool.  Or, the converse, I know that a "hot" time of the day, or day of the week is xxx, I want to raise my bids during that time frame.

Keep the ideas coming.  I want to evaluate all of the options!!

Using Google's interface to bid % down or up is one way to bid, but not a recommended best practice.  For one, the current AdWords editor does not allow you to copy/paste day of week/time of day settings so when you have multiple campaigns, it's a huge pain to manually set this all up. 

Second, your bid optimization can easily become non-optimal if you incorrectly set the %s.  A better way to do this, if you are using bid optimization software, is to create two identical campaigns that are set to turn off/on on certain times of day or days of week.  And let the bid optimization software determine the best bids for the AM vs. PM.  Or weekend vs. weekday.  Or whichever breakdown on time of day/day of week that lets you optimize conversions.  If you're right that lunch is a bad time for conversion rate, but dinner hours are great, set different campaigns for each and let bid optimization software bid for you. 

I have tested most of the tools out there over the last few years except the latest one from Webtrends, and I have to admit that nothing really compares to an analyst working on the account. Of course this has its own limitations but the main problems I found with using those tools are:The problem with not using a tool nowadays is when you go for a pitch and you try to explain to the potential customer that you don't use a tool, but an experienced analyst. The customer will look at you in disbelief and go for a company thats uses the latest tool that has its own algorithm blah blah blah. I personally think a clever analyst with some common sense and an interest in the products is far better than any tool out there. Of course technology develops and I am sure a tool will come out that works better than a human!