Artices on seperate pages are each counted as individual. This is why each page is assigned a page rank and not one page rank for the whole site. Each page is cached individualy and is considered it's own entity by the search engines. If this were not so, then when a spider hit a site the first time, the whole site would be indexed right then, but it is on a page by page index. So each link is counted seperately.
you do need to submit them to as many directories as you can to divirsify your ip addresses for the links to be effective. plus it give you more chances of getting picked up and republished from other directories traffic.
One good article can get you several PR5 or PR 6 links, and with you controlling the title and content , which makes the page relevant, these are powerfull links.
article marketer is a good distributor, and there are loads of software on the market. some free, and some that cost.
Brad Callens has a pretty good list of directories in the free version here
Internet Marketing Wish List | Article Submitter » Article Submitter
you could pay for the full version, but before doing that, i would hire articlemarketer.com to do it for me. I have a dozen accounts with them already for clients. It is money well spent if you are serious about making big bucks on the net.
Make sure that your onpage and anchor text is targeted and start writing.
You can learn here about article marketing in detail.
Article Marketing and SEO. The Super Advantages of Articles
"With todays new no link trading policy(or is it just buying , or both?) from Google are these the best methods to getting quality links? "
It is both now.