With AP1 they were the only company that had anything approaching level 2/3 in a publicly available production vehicle. Google might have been ahead of them but it's hard to tell since all we ever saw were carefully staged demos.

Was it? Weren't things like Distronic+ w/ Steering Assist (and Audi and BMWs equivalents) almost the same thing?

Similar, but from what I've read, Tesla did it better. I think this was the comparison I was thinking of in particular:

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...

I chalked some of the differences to being more defensive than AP

For example, I'd be surprised if you took one of those competing systems to "fail road" and it started to veer the way Tesla's system does instead of disengaging

Actually, they are and have always been in front of the pack.