Electric motors may be commodities if you're running a factory. However, if you're building electric cars, there is a lot of real engineering necessary. An interesting part of the Elon Musk interview at the MIT event a few days ago... A question was asked about how Tesla was able to get such a high power to weight ratio which is much higher than standard industrial motors. Musk went into a rather detailed answer, part of which was how they tackled the problem of keeping the motor from overheating by using coaxial cooling of the rotor.
Your detailing of the problems with the Ford (torque steer, and wheel spin at low speeds) are a few other problems that take real EV engineers, not ICE car engineers. Ford is an ICE car company and all the best engineering and marketing will go into ICE cars. EVs from Ford may get to the point of "good enough" but will never excel. (Something about old dogs and new tricks.)
Uh ... Torque steer is a power transmission problem, not a power generation problem. Eliminated by going to RWD, or most likely buiding a platform designed to take a EV drive system. It really has nothing to do with the electric motor. And Tesla hasn't solved this problem either, as RWD eliminates torque steer.
And wheelspin at low speeds is partly due to weight balance, the front differential, and crap OEM tries. All of which have no bearing on the drive unit. Sure some slight traction control, and better low speed torque mapping could help, but just as much if not more is really car engineering. Again Tesla isn't fighting this battle either due to choosing RWD.
As far as 'good enough' and not excelling Ford has a better backup camera. Better energy displays, and driver information. Much better navigation setup, much better general ergonomics, much better headlamps, better brights, more comfortable seats, higher quality floor mats, much better interior lighting, a place to put sunglasses, much better fan control on auto climate, quieter AC compressor, much better windshield washer nozzles, and a rear parcel shelf that gets lifted with the tailgate.
It's easy to say Tesla used some special engineering to get a more power dense electric motor, than an industrial motor. But industrial motors don't need to be small. If I have a pump that needs a 50hp motor, the pump itself is going to be of such a size that motor size is not really important. Also industrial motors are designed to spin much slower than ones in automobile applications (save the Chevy Spark EV) which limit their high HP ratings (torque times speed is HP). So they aren't really directly comparable. And to imply that an established automaker will have a hard time water cooling something is laughable. An ICE is a much harder thing to temperature control.
