Difficulty of breaking RSA for a given key size
No. Breaking a 1024 bit RSA key is not as difficult as breaking a 128 bit symmetric key. The consensus is that it is considerably less difficult, perhaps more comparable to breaking a 80-bit symmetric key, which is $2^{48}$ times less difficult than breaking a 128-bit key; that's a lot less difficult (a hundred million million times less difficult).

The reason is that breaking a 1024 bit RSA key can be attempted using an integer factorization algorithm, without exhaustively trying divisors. For the state of the art, see this article on the current factorization record.