The Chinese governments approach to internet censorship is hardly random, but a heavy handed approach meant to blind just those citizens who aren't savvy enough to get around "The Great Firewall." Many of the other foreigners and even Chinese I know do not bother to employ VPN or proxy setups unless the government is currently blocking certain content or specific domains they are interested in (ie. youtube since March). Keyword based filtering, blocking entire netblocks, domain names, and messing with DNS are all within the usual bag of tricks the government employs. While I was able to get to the google.com main page via an IP address, most google owned sites outside of google.cn were blocked, unable to locate the domain via Chinese based DNS servers or incurring TCP resets at random. Forcing my DNS to my VPN provider's servers did solve the problem, but again, most people within the PRC don't bother to keep a list of proxies or have a paid VPN account, let alone know how to implement these solutions. Even forcing your DNS outside of the mainland, you're still at the mercy of the governments packet snooping, resets, and IP blocking. So while you're now able to connect to google.com via an IP address, you're still hoping the government hasn't begun blocking those IP addresses or started implementing random resets based on search content. The government filtering, censoring and blocking is very quick to adapt to methods of getting around whatever it is they're intending to accomplish.
I submitted the original story to inform rather than question the PRC governments right or ability to implement censorship. This is not a political matter for me, but rather an annoyance. I realized rather quickly just how much I depend on google (and how much I might need to change that). Google is the default search engine within my browser, my main email address of 7 years is handled through gmail, and I've become accustom to asking google to settle any fact based arguments that come up throughout my day. Whether or not I search for objectionable content via google is besides the point (I can get all of the same content out of China's dominant search engine, baidu.com), it was simply a shock not to be able to get to ANY google property.
On another note, this comes just days after the PRC government demanded that google give them more control over what is displayed on google.cn and/or remove all 'pornographic' content which appears within search results. If this was a move to point out how quickly the government can eliminate google's estimated 48M users within the PRC, it certainly worked on me.
