I have a pellet stove in my 2700sqft house. It's in a small den/office at the end of a 10-20 ft hallway on the east side of my house. Basically, it's really out of the way and not near anything we want to heat. With that said, I have a dual-fan window fan hanging from the doorway using the hall as a wind tunnel to blow hot air into the kitchen where the ceiling fan helps circulate it.
On high, that pellet stove can get the back room up to 80-90 on a 30F or warmer day and keep 3/4 of our 1st floor at 70-75. It doesn't quite reach our second living room or the 3 bedrooms upstairs, but the furnace can do those (plus hot water). A better setup would obviously be more efficient, but it was there when we bought the house and we have too many other things to fix!
We just put 8 new windows in the 2 living rooms so I'm hoping that will help a lot. Our programmable thermostats also help me see the furnace isn't coming on to do anything more than maintain 60F upstairs, and 68 in the furthest living room. (New windows should REALLY cut the drafts down and may well not need the furnace to heat this winter.)
With that said, we were still buying 1 ton of pellets each month. At $230-$240/ton (tax free where we bought them), that was damn close to the $300/month we spent on fuel oil. We also still had to fill the tank 3 times last winter. So I'm not really sure which was better for us.
Only upside to pellets is that I know how many I have left, how long that will last (roughly 1 bag per day), and I can go buy some NOW at a store instead of scheduling a delivery that'll cost $400 minimum. At least with pellets I could spend $50 and heat the house for the next 10 days or so.