As for its peers that do TP navigation better: Gears 3, Vanquish, Dark Souls... basically the majority of third-person games made by any competent developer. Rockstar just can't do TP movement.
Can't speak for Gears 3, as i've only played the first one (which is not amazing) but Vanquish has a completely opposite objective in terms of pacing and how to approach every encounter.
I don't think navigability is to be judged by the quickness in the response alone.
While GTA4 controlled like shit, RDR was already a big step forward and i think Max Payne 3 hit a good deal between realism and controllability, so you'll have a great deal of control over the character, while retaining that sense of weight and "fatigue" they wanted to convey, to mantain a relatively slow and methodical pace to the game.
Again, i don't think something like Chronicles of Riddick is inherently worse than something like Quake, just because it ties its controls to animations to achieve a completely different feel and pacing while playing.
Most games play along with limitations they deliberately impose on you (take stealth games as an example of this) but you don't held that up as a flaw to them, against other games with a different goal.
Of course not liking their approach and goal is totally fine, but that's another story.
I think you can define GTA4 (and RDR to an extent) as janky, but Max Payne 3 plays, i think, deliberately with its limitations, and the slower response in the navigation ties up in the mechanics of "commitment" i've described before.
Again, whether you're gonna like that or not is subjective.
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That said, i struggle to call Max Payne 3 a bad game, as i've had enough fun with it to install those 30GB twice, but i think it's fair to call it that, considering the utter idiocy they've showed in taking constantly away the control (though it gets a bit less tedious later on) and destroying what good was to be had.