Good post Mr M! Beat me to it again.
I'm of the opinion that if you like the feel of a guitar and feel it has the potential, go for it - upgrade, try a few different pickups and make it do what you want to do. There are no hard and fast rules about particular guitars for particular styles or sounds. Go with what you want and you'll end up with something unique.
While best known in the country styles, Teles are used for all kinds of other things: pop (Andy Summers), rock (Keith Richards, Jimmy Page), jazz (Abercrombie, Bill Frisell, James Kibbey), metal (John 5), blues (Roy Buchanan, Albert Collins). Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Telecaster_players - quite scary.
A good guitar is a good guitar - I don't like to say that only a guitar made in XXX is good enough - it's simply not true. My Baja Tele (Mexican - now owned by Andrew J Bryson) was selected over and above every US Tele Fender SA had in stock! It's also the only guitar I've ever owned that I didn't feel the need to change the pickups in!
True, you have a better chance of finding a magical example if you go for the upper end of the price brackets and generally the average quality is higher, but they also have the occasional dud. And the less expensive guitars occasionally have a great one too. The average quality of even entry level guitars is a lot better than some of the instruments that were used on many classic recordings.
Anyway, at the end of the day, it's not what you are playing on, but what you do with it.
