Alternative for makecell?

Question

While working on a solution for Typographic conventions template / package I came across https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/26692/28139 which makes use of the optional argument for \\ to increase spacing between rows. This works quite nice.

When trying out if makecell might be of help for my solution I found it to break the effect of the optional argument of \\.

The solution is to replace \\[1em] by \vspace{1em} \\ which works but is a bit less convenient. I was wondering though if there might be alternatives for makecell which are a bit more "robust" and still easy to use.

MWE (just comment out the \usepackage{makecell} to see the difference):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
%\usepackage{makecell}
\begin{document}
    \begin{tabular}{p{0.9\textwidth}}
        \lipsum[1-1][1-3] \[1em]
        \lipsum[2-2][1-3] \[1em]
        \lipsum[3-3][1-3] \[1em]
        \lipsum[4-4][1-3] \
    \end{tabular}
~\\

\begin{tabular}{p{0.9\textwidth}}
    \lipsum[1-1][1-3] \vspace{1em} \\
    \lipsum[2-2][1-3] \vspace{1em} \\
    \lipsum[3-3][1-3] \vspace{1em} \\
    \lipsum[4-4][1-3] \\
\end{tabular}

\end{document}