Having lived in China for the last 1.5 years, I find that the more annoying thing is not when sites get blocked in China. Rather, it's when sites get slowed down due to packet shaping, or something else, just because the site is foreign, has been marked as not nice, or something else. That is REALLY annoying. So of course as soon as I turn on my VPN, there's no problem at all accessing those sites.
Yeah, very true. Have a look here, the GFW adds at least 200ms to simple ping: http://just-ping.com/
My website is working: http://readbo.com
and its a social news reader, that means you can read twitter and facebook through it :) might be useful for China