I never had the impression that APM was anything "elite". It's a rank somewhere around the SWE-3 level of project management. I'm sure there are APMs who get great opportunities, just as there are SWE-2's and -3's that land on the best projects pretty randomly.

If you want to be a PM, Google probably isn't the best place for you, just as you probably wouldn't work for a steel company to write software.