That's the way historians have looked at medieval history in general in the past -- how 'successful' various medieval rulers were at laying foundations for the modern states. But that's not what medieval rulers worked towards. They had different priorities, and different criteria for what they considered success.
This kind of anachronism has plagued medieval history until very recently; in fact it is still not completely gone.
Same as above -- no medieval ruler was trying 'put into place' any kind of 'order' for the future. And this is why the Francophone kings of England were often so much more interested in their family holdings in France. And this is also why, despite centralising things like justice and taxation more thoroughly than the French kings and the German emperors, the kings of England remained far inferior in prestige to both, by contemporary standards (and this inferiority complex drove a great deal of their ambition and activity both in England and outside).
So fair old England was surely united... as a relatively insignificant part of the holdings of Francophone families like the Angevins and the Plantagenets. Only when they lost their French possessions did they begin to pay more attention to their English ones and take their Anglo-Saxon inhabitants more seriously.