Most animals, even single celled, need to have some way to handle the separation between "me" and "the rest of the world". I look at say my cat - it definitely has this concept somewhere in its brain circuitry. What human has is just more neurons.
As for your analogy, it is true that microorganisms can perform wonderful feats, but it is a bit misleading to equate that to general intelligence. It is like saying a compiler is smarter than a programmer, because its design incorporates tricks the human may not know. (The bacteria being "designed" by the trial-and-error process of natural selection, rather than an intelligent entity, of course.)