Great rundown and great idea to get one person at the market to chase everything down. One suggestion: add to above, the hanyu pinyin and hanzi for each item (nouns), so somebody with some Mandarin skills can deal with market themselves rather than require a helper to go along.

And mnredfox can hopefully put a link to this thread in the master FAQ sticky.

Might also be a good idea on this thread, to put names and locations of best electronic markets for each of the major cities travelers are likely to enter in (BJ, SH, GZ, SZ).