It's not necessary for Data to be particularly advanced, though. The thing making him special is that he's positronic. Essentially, Soong wanted to do a demonstration on his futuristic positronic brains, and chose an android as the medium - even though apparently androids are of zero worth and interest as such in the 24th century, because none are seen and none but Soong's are equipped with sapience.
In the 23rd, for all we know, androids are common everywhere except aboard Prime Kirk's ship. Pine Kirk has some as medical helpers in ST:ID (perhaps required for extracting Kirk's corpse from the warp core); Earth has some acting as policemen. The same could be true of the Prime 2260s where TOS "Return to Tomorrow" has Dr Mulhall express indignation at the idea that the aliens would build their own androids instead of letting Starfleet do it for them.
These androids would not be particularly sapient. But 0718 in his onscreen minutes so far has not demonstrated all that much sapience, either. Doesn't mean sapience couldn't be an optional extra for 2260s androids, even if all the real commercial and military demand is for nonsapient androids.
All that said, I, too, prefer to think of 0718 as Lobot - the Abrams counterpart to Geordi LaForge, a "disabled" person who in fact is much more "abled" than his colleagues.
Timo Saloniemi
