For an excellent critical take on the IBM Cortical Simulator achieving ‘the intelligence of a cat’, read Jonah Lehrer’s Blog. Essential Quote:

In the coming years, there will be many grand announcements about supercomputers that attempt to imitate the machinery inside the skull. One way to distinguish between such claims is to look at their cellular realism: Are these microchips really behaving like neurons? Or has the simulation taken a shortcut, and turned our neurons into dumb little microchips? Because we sometimes forget that the “mind is like a computer” metaphor is only a metaphor. The mind is really just a piece of meat.

[Source: The Frontal Cortex]