Three cheers for Arizona Road Warrior's detailed expansion of the points made earlier about the horrors of organised tourism in China.
Minor quibbles:
Grey Lines: Vastly overpriced, and in the case of the Beijing tours also unable to resist the shopping stop nonsense. On the other hand at weekends there's a wide choice of Chinese tours that make no shopping stops at all, and that are dramatically cheaper. Some of these run daily.
Internal flights: Never use a travel agent overseas if you want to pay anything like the real price. Most domestic flights in China are completely unknown to computers overseas, and the pricing available within China is often half or less than the pricing offered overseas on those routes that are on the system. Buy your tickets a few days in advance from local agents and pay a great deal less. If you absolutely cannot deal with this, then buy them no more than about three weeks in advance from one of the Chinese on-line agencies such as Ctrip (although there can be hiccups with these. Buying locally is best.)
Tipping: To be quite clear about this, there is no tipping in China other than that foisted on hapless tour groups. So it isn't that tipping is 'included', but just that the best (and most expensive) tour groups avoid the issue. The foreign tour director (and it's worth paying for a tour that has one of these as it can dramatically reduce the shenanigans routinely practiced on foreign tour groups) is tipped according to the standards of the nationality of the foreign tour company he represents (which may in many cases also mean no tips, depending on the company's nationality) and the advice it gives (and then it is truly performance-based, not guaranteed).
But poor food, overly packed itineraries, shopping stops with prices ten to fifteen times too high, and outrageous tipping recommendations, and Party-sanitized mendacious historical and cultural information, are indeed the common currency of budget tours in particular.
Peter N-H