The Chinese appliances and electronics I've bought have been either great or absolute crap, although the worst offenders are digital things like USB sticks and MP3 players where they're just knocking stuff off -- MP3 players that look like iPods.

As for the rest... I'd vote for Haier for appliances because they don't *need* to be tech-intensive to do well -- they just need to leverage the huge China market and keep manufacturing costs somewhat low. But the other companies? Prefab cars have got a shot in Africa and the Middle East (I read about that being Cherry's strategy), but are probably DOA in the United States and Europe and environmental restrictions will keep them behind homegrown companies for long enough that the shift to electric will probably make them uncompetitive.

Be curious to see what happens with the Loongson chip. Cool article raving about it on the Reg here. Only question I have is... if they're supposed to be so cheap why aren't they in consumer goods yet? If the thing runs Linux it should be possible to find big markets for it in embedded stuff already:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/25/ict_godson_3b_chip/