Thanks for the responses.

Yes thanks for the reminder! They had no gates so deplanning was done through buses, though they did have a separate minibus for business passengers which got us to the terminal quicker.

Yes definitely a medicore product, but the silver lining is that Air China can be a good value sometimes, especially for catching connections to other parts of China and perhaps milegage runs.

With the amount of capital available to CA I think it is a matter of time they catch up unless someone is seriously messing around.