I think implicit in that question was, 'and how does it differ?'

A friend of mine has a joke in which he describes any arbitrary magic card (and later, things that weren't magic cards) by explaining how it differed from an Ornithopter (Suq'Ata Lancer is just like an Ornithopter except it's red instead of an artifact, and it has haste and flanking instead of flying, and it costs 2 and a red instead of 0, and it has 2 power instead of 0. Yup, just like an Ornithopter). The humor lay in the anti-compression - the descriptions were technically accurate, but rather harder to follow than they needed to be.

Eradicating the humor, you could alternately describe a Suq'Ata Lancer as a Gray Ogre with haste and flanking. The class of 'cards better than Gray Ogre' is a reference class that many magic players would be familiar with.

Trying to get a handle on the idea of the tulpa, it's reasonable to ask where to start before you try comparing it to an ornithopter.