I think what you're describing is Electronic Stability Control (ESC), which is a separate system from Traction Control (TCS). Traction Control is designed to keep your wheels from slipping. It does this by monitoring the speed at which each wheel is turning and applying either brakes or additional power to correct. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_control_system.

Electronic Stability Control (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control is designed to prevent a vehicle from going into a spin, oversteer or understeer situation due to wheel slippage or driver overcorrection. It does this by sensing vehicle yaw (rotation), lateral acceleration, individual wheel speed and steering inputs and applies the brakes to individual wheels to try and make the vehicle go in the direction the system thinks the driver wants.

Unfortunately, if you are an experienced driver and are not familiar with ESC, and are purposefully pushing your vehicle outside of normal limits, you may be unpleasantly surprised when ESC "corrects" your intended skid and continues to "correct" you off the road, despite your resistance. My (now ex-) wife wasn't happy with me for doing that with her 2-week old Highlander. Fortunately, the damaged buffed out fine (mostly ).

Moral of story: Practice using ESC on big, empty parking lots, and not on narrow, twisty-turny, country roads.

Blizzaks ARE good

Another good tire, if you don't want to go quite that far is Nokian Tire. The make what they call an "All Weather" (vs All season) radial that actualyy has a Mountain and Snowflake rating. Most "all season" tires are optimized for good weather, and are "OK" (hahah) in snow

Nokian went the other way - a snow tire that is OK in the dry. NOT inexpensive, but do hold up better than the Blizzaks (I don't know about current Blizzaks, but part of their trick was that they used a very very soft compound, and they were great until they wore down to the somewhat hard compund below)