I've never been clear on the bit order within a byte - can you expand on that? I used to think that the differently endian machines also shuffled the bit order around as well. At this point I'm just confused.

In many cases, you can ignore bit order since bits do not have separate memory addresses. "Byte order" matters because you can access a byte as either the "first" byte (lowest address) in a "string" of bytes or as the "high" or "low" byte in a multi-byte numeric value. If you don't try to do both, then "byte order" doesn't matter, but using pack or unpack often means you are looking at bytes both ways. But, there is no "first" bit in packed data.

If you have a text format ("unpacked" string) that shows bits (or hexidecimal nybbles or octal "digits") in a specific order, then you may have to worry about "bit order" (or other sub-byte order) if you've got something not using the near-universal "most significant digit first" ordering that is used when writing numbers in any base. Of course, pack and unpack (quite unfortunately) make a mess of this, as noted in Re^2: pack/unpack 6-bit fields. (precision) and (tye)Re: Ascending vs descending bit order.

Put another way, "byte order" is usually used in reference to a detail of a computer's design and "bit order" doesn't matter in this context. However, both "bit order" and "byte order" can be applied to text representations of data (or even other "unpacked" representations where bits from within a byte get encoded into multiple bytes/characters of some other representation).