I agree with you about AppleWorks being one of the best programs ever written; I used it myself for many years and it's an impressive combination of power, simplicity and a small footprint - the text rendering is poor but that's the only real problem.
However I'm afraid there is absolutely no chance whatever of Apple bringing it back. They regard Pages and Numbers as replacements, and Bento for databases (though there is no comparison) - Filemaker Pro is the only substitute. The program has been unsupported and not sold for some years now and Apple certainly have no interest in reviving it: this would require rewriting it from the ground up (and I understand there are technical problems as to why the program can't just be upgraded).
There are possibilities to keep running it: you should be able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard disk and start from that (provided that the Mac did not come with anything higher than Snow Leopard originally installed); and success has been reported in running Snow Leopard under emulation in Parallels - the method is described here: it seems complex and I haven't tried it: use at your own discretion.
Otherwise I'm afraid you will just have to get used to using the modern alternatives. This article might give you the odd idea:
http://rfwilmut.net/aw
