The 20 or 24B US$ deal with France is the LPG deal spread over about 20 years or so. The JF-17 deal is about 1.6B US$ for 100 aircraft, which will have avionics, A2A missiles, training and some level of ToPT also.
As a second option, they have the Italians, the ones who provided us the Grifo-M radars for ROSE upgraded Mirages and Grifo radars for the F-7Ps and F-7PGs. They provided us the Falco UAV, and inshAllah in future we may see the Italian based Turkish manufactured T-129 in PA aviation too. So yes the Italians are the back up plan, rather they were the most likely contenders, till this Zardari and thugs showed up, as Italians have been good to us in the last few years.
And the western option for JF-17 makes the Chinese work more hard for producing better products as they don't wish to lose PAFs order, as if PAF buys them, internationally Chinese products will be seen then as competitive compared to western, as PAF buys the best available on the market as per its resources.
And the current JF-17 avionics package is no less compared to the currently available on the market.