J-10Cs are not coming with AL-31. China waited until WS-10B is mature on J-10Cs before exporting them. There is no need for local assembly of AESA radar when JF-17 project already has AESA radar that I'm sure PAC can request to locally assemble. Russia's 5th generation project is a disaster right now. Why would anyone want to join that?
The biggest mistake India made were participating in the Su-30MKI project and then Su-57. They ended giving a lot of money to fund Russia development for years and got no 5th generation aircraft and an improved su-27 that took years to mature and is now way behind other 4.5 generation aircraft in electronics. Of course, it gave armchair QBs on Internet as lot of time to boast about what great weapons their trusted Russian friend was giving them (that China didn't have access to) and how they were going to destroy China. In reality, it was a big waste of their time for a fleet that is still struggling to achieve availability on it.
Don't get obsessed with stuff like PL-15E vs PL-15. No one here knows how capable the version PL-15 version is or what version PAF is getting for sure. It doesn't really matter. The published range on these things are meaningless. PAF will have to do its own testing to see what is a realistic NEZ on it and then utilize that in the battle field. It's more useful for combat readiness to have a reliable and available aircraft in service as soon as possible. That allows you to train with it, develop tactics and discover/improve its capability.
I'm sure that's not as fun as telling Indians my radar has 400 more T/R modules and sees 10 km further out than yours, so I will win. That kind of arguments is meaningless. You have something that will be in your service with basically similar size, payload and generation of electronics. It's up to PAF now to bring it up to the best combat capability and work with CAC to improve it. Not only will PLAAF help PAF with getting trained on J-10Cs, but PAF will also help CAC/PLAAF with knowledge and ideas from its own experience. That's how this kind of stuff works. China is delivering J-10Cs on a very tight schedule due to its close relationship with Pakistan at the cost of its own production slots. This is not about making money off PAF as a couple of people alluded to up the thread. This is about helping a friend out and then helping each other out.
Deino, did you see some recent source that pointed to this? I admit that I haven't tracked things closely in the recent years. Back 5 years ago, I remember a lot of rumbling coming out that the first major improved variant for J-10/flankers coming out was going to have 12% greater thrust than 12.5t of the first iteration of production WS-10. Which would point to 14t or about 137kN. Based on the time frame, the first batch of J-10Cs that received WS-10B should be getting that variant. The version they built for J-20 may or may not have greater thrust. Unfortunately, with the death of CJDBY, it's hard to find a good place to read up on this.