Jeff,
You are reading too much into the Varyag. It certainly is not being outfitted. It still sits as a rusting enginless hulk. It would cost a fortune for the PRC to outfit it back to operational status.
They may not make it operational...in my book series I do not see them taking that track. But they are studying it and learning. They may end up doing something entirely different and unexpected...that's what I try and project, creating very capable STOL/VTOL carriers first in numbers for battling it out close in...followed later by larger deck carriers.
We shall see.
That's also my view about the Varyag-it makes little sense to modernise that ship even from a Chinese point of view .IIRC,the Chinese purchased the decomissioned Aussie carrier,the Melbourne for scrap,which they stripped for studying.A non-Soviet carrier would anyway be more useful in most cases given that the dual role carried by a USSR carrier is close to non-existent.Besides,I do think that China would need massive international or Russian aid to modify the Varyag into something like the Admiral Gorshkov which is being radically modified for India.