The thing is, we're most likely going to get immortal machines far ahead of smart ones. And while machine entities might already be all powerful, individually it's just millions of little pieces scattered all over the place doing dumb, trivial things.

I liked it a lot better when we had Landrew (STTOS reference: Return of the Archons) That was something Joe Blow could get his head around.

I think Ian M. Banks had the right idea when he suggested that in the Culture, it was possible (if very rare) for a human to augment themselves that far, but that those that did so were no longer considered human and so it wasn't really an issue.