I agree with you and it's a good distinction to make. But I think that it is not trivial to just divide out how much of what we do is self-improvement, and how much is recursive self-improvement. As you say, it is definitely possible for us to do recursive self-improvement (meta-learning, or however you want to call it.) That's really all that needs to be said to reiterate that humans stand as a sort of natural GAI.
I do think, as with the case of a master pianist, or all sorts of trades, that our ability to learn increases with our actual understanding. So the master pianist has not just self-improved, but he has also gained the ability to play highly technical pieces on sight -- which represents the action of recursive self-improvement. He has learned how to learn pieces much easier, faster, and better.
There is no adult master pianist whose ability to learn new pieces is orders of magnitude better than that of a 12-year old prodigy (i.e., the same master pianist when they were 12 years old). The primary difference between them is not their ability to learn, but how much they have learned -- i.e., pianistic technique, non-pianistic skills related to general musicianship, musical interpretation and style, etc.
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.