In this contribution we investigate the performance of the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) long-term evolution (LTE) physical layer using turbo coding and 64QAM with Gray mapping. We show how the mapping of systematic and parity bits to the six different bit positions defining one complex 64QAM symbol influences the convergence of the turbo decoder and thereby the bit error rate (BER) performance as well as number of necessary decoding iterations. Exploiting the unequal error protection (UEP) property of Gray mapped 64QAM results in an signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance gain of approximately 2 dB for the non-iterative system and leads to goodput gains especially in regions of low SNR.