Google recently pulled out of China because it won't play nice with Chinese policies on censorship.
Chinese netizens divided over Google move
From what I've read on the web, North Americans generally praise Google for standing up for its principles. The average Chinese could care less since their search engine of choice is baidu.com. There's a lot of bickering going back and forth between both camps, with Americans denouncing the Chinese government for oppressing freedoms and the Chinese criticizing Google for serving US political agendas to de-harmonize nations around the world.
While netizens in both camps fight it out, Yahoo and Bing are eagerly planning to fill the void Google left behind.
Yeah, google has a history of doing what they want and aggravating complacent powers. I think a friend told me when google went public, they completely bypassed investment bankers or people on wall street , so the rich couldn't get richer for doing nothing. That made a lot of fat cats angry.
in the long run google's decision won't mean much. like you said, bing/google/baidu are all there to fill the void, and plenty of chinese use special proxy's to get past the china firewall.
nevertheless, i respect google's decision to stand for something. its nice to see a corporation put principle before profits every now and then.