What Wessex, Cumulo and Whirly are telling you is all true if all you want is to enjoy the thrill of piloting an aircraft yourself. In other words, it's the art/skill/magic of flying that attracts you.
But if it's the "go places" that attracts you, then a PPL opens a whole load of opportunities that you generally do not have pre-PPL. Last week I planned a flight from Rotterdam to Fairoaks for a courtesy visit to a Business Partner of ours. Business trip which unfortunately got cancelled (but I am replanning) due to the weather. I'm also thinking of flying to Ameland somewhere next week, just to walk on the beach for a couple of hours. That's a one-hour flight which would otherwise be a four-hour trip, including a ferry ride.
Also, once you've got that PPL, flying becomes cheaper. For starters you don't have to pay an instructor, and you can let your passengers share some of the cost.
Each his own motivation of course, and everybody is limited by budget, but for me, I would get seriously demotivated if it took me several years to get my PPL. (And because of that, I did one of those three-week PPLs in Florida!)
Oh, and if you're just flying for the kick of it (which I can fully understand), then there are cheaper alternatives than flying a Group-A-spamcan. Microlights (3-axis or weight-shift) have been mentioned, but also gliders, deltas, autogyros. My first air experience was actually in (underneath) a parapente, and you have foot-launched-motorized-parapentes too nowadays. All these alternatives involve flying of some sort, all of them give you a great buzz (probably even greater than in a spam can) and all of them are cheaper. The disadvantage is that you can't seriously "go places" with some of these "aircraft" (let alone take passengers), and that you cannot always count the hours flown in them towards a PPL.
So it all depends on "why do you want to fly?"