I haven't really seen the narrative that it all comes down to lidar. I mean it's one sensor type amongst vision, lidar, gps, ultrasonics, sound and radar. For whatever reason Tesla has chosen to go a bit minimalist there.

TBF the Ford CEO, in an interview, said lidar is the difference. But I can't blame him for going with the sound bite in that context. No doubt he knows there are lots of differences. My favorite underappreciated difference is that Google has crazy amounts of geospatial data.