A lot of them do "just work", and the rest can be made to. See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.... for the full story, or create a ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file that contains something like:

  {
      "~d" = "deleteWordForward:";
      "~f" = "moveWordForward:";
      "~b" = "moveWordBackward:";
  }

The "~" means "Meta"; all this does is set up M-d, M-f, M-b to work like they do in Emacs.