This will probably put me in the "mower snob" category... but, here is my opinion.
For anyone who actually wants to use their lawn mower for anything else than mowing a very small yard... the 1000 series should be avoided. It truely is "bottom of the barrel". For the price, you can probably either get something better from another brand or the same quality for less.
The 2500 series is around 50% more (msrp), but gets you the shaft drive that is important to some people. Plus, I'd argue its better suited and built for non-mowing activities like... snow pushing.
On a related note, I think using a small lawn mower for snow pushing is probably not the best way of doing things. If you only get 2-3" of snow... well, then it's probably fine. I have a Sc2400 and I use that to push snow with the FEL and last winter, it sure had it's *** full trying to push all the snow we got. I couldn't even imagine trying to push all that snow with a much smaller lawn mower (less than half the weight) without a locking diff and without 4wd. On the other hand, a small lawn mower with a snow blower would be fine, I would think.
This is just my opinion... of course, you can do with it what you will.