As you have seen the date token is pretty plain and the format is set in place.  But with adding some simple extras to it you can format the date in many different ways.  All you need to do is add format="Insert Formatting Here" in your date token as seen below.

Original date token: <$date/$>

Token update: <$date format="MMMM d, yyyy"/$>

There are many other ways to change the formatting of the date token by adding the format="Insert Formatting Here".  Please view http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx for many other options.