Nope, not at all--it very clearly means "a self-aware machine capable of consciousness, volition and even a strangely emotionless form of frustration." I understood that at the ripe old age of nine--I may not have
I'm sorry, but...what's the difference between a "self-aware machine" and a self-aware grapefruit?
In what sense is this thing a "machine," and why does it matter that it is?
I mean, beyond the opportunity for Roddenberry et al to repeat some vapid platitudes about emotion and logic?
There's just nothing there that's even significant, much less interesting when one thinks about it in any detail. The script points regarding V'Ger are a litany of assertions that depend upon (as one early reviewer put it) the fact that no character ever really questions the bald statements of another regarding what's happening or why for the plot to progress at all.
An example of minor interest except that the coherence (such as it is) of the plot hinges upon it: Decker asserts that "Voyager Six disappeared into what they used to call a 'black hole' over three hundred years ago."
Well, of course we know what the Voyager series probes were (unlike the mythical "Nomad") and of course the few that really were launched were sailing along through space at the end of the 20th century at a relatively leisurely pace nowhere near the speed of light. Which means, for one thing, that there's an undiscovered black hole somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Earth and for another thing that we would somehow be able to determine from the still-functioning instruments aboard the gadget that it had a) encountered exactly such an object and b) "disappeared into it" - as opposed to just being destroyed outright by it.
The first is exceedingly unlikely and the second is preposterous. All we might possibly get back from one of those probes would be sudden loss of signal. One can imagine - that is, make up a story - that there might be some kind of indication from some (unspecified) kind from some instrument that might cause some physicist to speculate about the probe having encountered something anomalous...but nothing that would enable Decker or anyone else to announce as a matter of historical fact that the aforementioned magical thing happened.
It's a line of dialogue - like so much of what's said in the movie - that's nothing but hand waving. It's the same as saying "hocus-pocus." The writers simply had to be able to present something as an explanation for the nonsense that was occurring, and they settled on that. Countersigned, of course, by the "science advisors" on the film who apparently enjoyed being involved the movies immensely. It paid well and was terribly flattering.
As to the nonsense of the basic premise of "V'ger" itself, I'll just defer to John Scalzi for the moment:
He's being kind (okay, actually, he's going for the laugh) - giving the raccoon Ecuador at least makes a kind of simplistic linear sense (it gets the raccoon off that traffic island, right); what the denizens of the machine planet are asserted to have done does not.
And, again, all of this pooh-bah and foolishness is in service of "dramatizing" (ahem) the profoundly important "message" that Emotions Are Good.
Why wonder that no one but Trekkies were impressed by this thing? Reflect instead upon how desperate we were for Trek to continue that Trekkies lept so eagerly to get at the Kool-Aid. Compared to that, minimizing the logical failins of the Abrams movie doesn't even constitute a short hop - and in exchange, this time we get some competent entertainment.
Not that again! 
