I'm going to say it, and I don't mean this in any kind of ironical way...Warren Ellis should not be allowed near Japanese mecha. I read the first two-thirds of TSW, and just didn't feel any of the love that I feel when watching something as hokey as Power Rangers or Gigantor, much less Transformers or GiTS. Ellis just lacks the wild abandon required to write mecha.
It's because his style is to home in on the horrible underbelly of his subject...in this case, some kid who was killed when Tokyo was bombed that was dreaming all this stuff up. That kind of thing just doesn't mesh with mecha, whose sole purpose is to be Big Shiny Toys, even when dealing with as serious subjects as "what if life?" as GiTS does.
I dunno. Maybe it was because TSW was Ellis wanting to write mecha and assuming he could. Whatever the reason, TSW has always stuck in my craw as the one thing I wish Ellis had never written.