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So many of Google's products prove the contrary.

I surmise that you're misinterpreting the statement.

I wouldn't disagree that good engineering includes good user experience. But I would have thought that good engineering would include a bit more than that.

Good UX engineering is good UX engineering. Software engineering / architecture / development in general is not necessarily the same.

An app can be beautifully engineered by have an awful UX. The inverse is less likely to be true (because bugs and obvious flaws like long delays and unresponsive UIs can quickly degrade UX), but still possible.

The problem I was alluding to in my original post is that the user is divorced from the engineering decisions -- as if there can be a better way of building something that doesn't take into account the very reason that it exists at all.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft can turn the ship. They've got lots of really smart people and a lot of cool ideas.