http://gs.statcounter.com/press/open-letter-ms#incorrect-wei...
As for usage, I also don't buy that. Most people in China are online primarily through their phones, but in first tier cities (which is still a gigantic population), people have bandwidth that most Americans could only dream of. Youku, for example, streamed 5 times the hours of video content as all of Youtube last I checked. And Tudou (which it is merging with) was a competitor on the same scale! In terms of page views, I'd be shocked if Amazon had as many as Taobao. No US news portal approaches QQ. Actually, Tencet (owner of QQ) is considering buying Yahoo!. The only way in which China's internet is small is in the amount of money its users want to spend on content.
True about IE and banks, but its easy enough to use IE when banking online and switch to whatever else you want.
I don't know what the numbers really are; I suspect IE use is still high but might be lower in Beijing given all the Macbooks being used by the middle class.
http://battery-pack-adapter.com/beijing-unicom-broadband-spe...
As for banking, the problem was that their active X component was a .exe download. Even with IE, it wasn't doable on a mac. ICBC did claim to have a mac app in the works, but I didn't see it before leaving.