I think you could say that about our own genes as well. They don't physically pull the levers and whatnot to make their own copies. They rely on external cell machinery to pull the strands apart and start transcription and so on.

A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.

You know, like a spicy meme :)