Or maybe there's no secret sauce for intelligence and if the system / organism can display all that functionality then should just say it's intelligent.

I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I'm not convinced by the "secret sauce" / internal monologue school of intelligence.

If we want to be pragmatic, we should just think about smart tests and just assume it's intelligent if the system passes those tests. It's what we do with other people (I don't really know if they feel inside like I do, but given they are the same biological beings, it sounds quite likely)

This point I'm trying to make is to describe comprehension as the equal to decomposing an observation, identifying each sub-component of an observation and the key characteristic of that component which when combined with the other sub-components create the original observed entity. This is akin to proving the object can exist, comprehension is mentally proving to yourself that this can exist and you're not being deceived. Comprehension is fraud detection via 'reversing compiling' an observation to prove to yourself that it is understandable and can indeed exist.