For anyone else who finds themselves in the same position. Allow me to summarize from my experience. I ended up getting my apartment cleaned not once, not twice but 3 times.
First - for those of you coming from Japan - accept that the standards in this country are much, much lower than what you are used to. If you cannot deal with this - you'll give yourself a stroke during this process. The very best job I saw was about on par with a pretty crappy cleaning job in Japan.
Second, SmartHome (www.shome.com.hk) is a huge waste of money (although not much money). After they cleaned - the floors were left gritty, they didn't mop and there was still red sauce near the window. When I called to ask them to come back and explained that the floors clearly hadn't been mopped they accused me over either a) spilling the red sauce myself or b) someone else must have broken into my apartment and had lunch. This for a brand-new apartment that had never been lived in (while I was still living in a different building).
Third, the Johnson Group does a much better job but they are extremely expensive. They actually got on their hands and knees and put some real effort into getting the floor cleaned. Unfortunately, you can't trust them to pay attention on their own so it took me several inspections of the floor to point out places that weren't cleaned well enough before things were acceptable.
Finally, I asked a friend's helper to come over and to be honest she did the best job.
So there you go - getting your place cleaned in HK is a huge pain in the butt and you have to be willing to live with the generally poor quality of the results. However, the Johnson Group did a good enough job that the remaining effort was easily covered by 1 person in the course of an afternoon or 2.