Greg, thanks for the info! China Mobile has a 3G (they call it G3 I dunno why) data only plan. Anyone out there tried it? I had CMobile CDMA data before and it was slow as expected, but highly unstable except for majorly populated areas. It would become total crap on the rim of the city. There coverage map with CDMA was BS because yes you had signal, no you didn't have stable internet. I was wondering if this was the G3 case. Anyone out there tried data only with CMobile or Unicom? Wanna ask before I shell out on a worthless product that only works in my downtown office where I have aDSL anyway

never tried china mobile or China telecom's 3g service so don't know.
However, the background is as follows:
China Mobile has never had a CDMA business. That did belong to China Unicom and has now been sold to China Telecom. China Telecom is using CDMA and the 3g standard CDMA2000 (used in the US by Verizon and Sprint). China Mobile is being forced by the government to use the largely untested TD-SCDMA. This technology is the reason that China is a decade behind in rolling out 3G. The government refused to issue 3G licences giving royalties to foreign companies until they'd had an attempt at creating their own standard. This attempt took a decade and still hasn't proven to work consistently. Infact China Mobile are furious that they've been forced to use it. It was supposed to be ready for the Olympics but wasn't. Infact there have been countless occasions over the last few years when it was supposed to be ready but kept getting delayed because it simply didn't work. Supposedly it now works but who knows.
China Unicom are using WCDMA which is the international standard and the only one which can support HSPA (high speed packet access) which is really 3.5G. This is the only one where the phone or modem you buy can be used all over the world just by replacing the SIM card.

I'm using China Unicom and it works most places but there are patchy areas and in those cases it goes down to plain old GPRS (China Unicom doesn't have the 2.75G EDGE network in place).

All 3G services in China have only been rolled out inside cities so far. I don't think you'll find any of them that'll work on the outskirts of Kunming. If you need to use it outside the urban area, its probably worth thinking about which 2G network you'd prefer to use rather than which 3G network.

As usual, Greg's expertise in this area shines through. Greg, is the WCDMA "3.5G" technology the reason that Apple was able to do the deal with China Unicom for officially bringing the iPhone to China?

Probably. Although they are having to build a specific model for China anyway as there will be no wifi. If they're going so far as to make a different model they could do one with TD-SCDMA. I just think perhaps Unicom were easier to negotiate with.