Note that most of them do. Huawei was banned from it but I'm not aware of other notable brands that do not ship Google software (besides that one vendor that ships Apple software)

Most Android phones sold in China include Google Play by default? That's news to me.

He might mean include the "stub" APKs that are necessary for Google Play to function in any phone, Huawei was famously not allowed to have those.

Yeah okay, so none of them come with Google Play but in general it's possible to install it, but on Huawei it's not, right? I could see that being the case.