When we create an editor and call setData() and focus(), we seem to see the data, but the focus is not there in any browser we tested. We are using CKEditor 4.1.
Here's our code sample if that helps:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>CKEditor test</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://nightly.ckeditor.com/13-04-05-14-51/full/ckeditor.js"></script>
</head>
<body><div style="width: 100%">
<textarea id="editor1" name="note"></textarea>
<script type="text/javascript">
var editor = CKEDITOR.replace('editor1');
editor.on('instanceReady', function(evt){
editor.setData("<p>Here is my first editor line.</p>");
editor.focus();
});
</script>
</div></body>
</html>