There is a lot more to AAW than just how many missiles you carry and their range. Otherwise, Type 045 wouldn't be considered one of the premier area defence destroyers out there.
One pro for Type 054A is that everything is produced inside China and all the subsystems are very mature. So once PN gets the ship, there shouldn't be too many teething issues that you would see with a new platform. I have no knowledge of what Indian built ships look like inside, but 054A combat system should be much newer than what you would see in a Russian built ship like Talwar class. You also wouldn't see any integration issues with using missiles, radar and ESM suites from different countries. That to me is something that I think always plagued Indian ships.
Having said all of this, it's not wise to dismiss IN surface fleet. Given the rather high requirements that Israeli Navy will likely have, I'm sure Barak-1 short range SAM will be very good at close in defence and probably better than even the Type 1130 CIWSs on Type 054A. Again, without knowing how well things are integrated on Shivalik, it's hard to say. Compared to Shivalik, Type 054As advantage is having a VLS system vs traditional launcher, since you can launch missiles faster. The illuminators and search radar should also be better than the Russian ones. But both HQ-16 and Shtil suffer from having to rely on illuminators. The main problem facing Shivalik is integration both Russians and Israeli weapons. I don't know what kind of sensor fusion they can have in this case. In the case of PLAN, they should theoretically have sensor fusion between the long range radar, main search radar, the illuminators and the x band radar on CIWS. And theoretically, there should be sensor fusion between the Chinese ships and possibly even with land based aircraft assets. Again, we do not know how much progress China has made in this front on 054A since they are not the primary air defence ships in PLAN.
If we look beyond Shivalik class, IN's newer ships with 32-cell Barak 8 air defense which would give them medium to long range air defense. While they will undoubtedly suffer from combining Russian/Israeli air defense systems, these ships should provide wider air defense umbrella than what 054A can provide. Given how much resources IN has, it's an indictment that project 15A and the new Project 17A (both larger ships) don't have much of an advantage over Type 054AP in AAW or ASuW.
For PN, there is no guarantee that IN will continue to squander the resource advantage it has. So, PN has to continue thinking about how to provide enough deterrent to prevent a IN blockade. The 4 054APs are a good first step. More conventional submarines are good to. I'm not a fan of purchasing more small ships. As PLAN continue its unprecedented buildup, PN should continue to make opportunistic purchases from China. That could come in the form of more 054APs or buying used 054As which probably still have a lot of service life.
