Starting with a rhetorical question was probably a bad idea. Let me try again:
But an AGI wouldn't be an AGI if it wasn't able to figure out how to solve the problem of getting from here to there and using in-situ resources to replicate itself.
I don't think this is true. An AGI which - due to practical limitations - cannot eat its future light cone can still be generally intelligent. Humans are potentially an example (minus the "artificial", but that isn't the relevant part).
Claiming that general intelligence can eat the universe by definition seems to suffer the same problem as the Socrates/hemlock question. It would mean we can't call something generally intelligent until we see it able to eat the universe, which would require not just theoretical knowledge but also the resources to pull it off. And if that's the requirement, then human general intelligence is an open question and we'd have zero known examples of general intelligence.
This does not seem to fit how we'd like to use the term to point to "the kind of problem-solving humans can do", so I think it's a bad definition.
(AGI can probably eat the universe, but that's more like a theorem than a definition.)
Ok there was an unstated assumption, but that assumption was that the AGI has physical effectors. Those effectors could be nearly anything, since with enough planning and time nearly any physical effector could be used to bootstrap your way to any other capability.
So many posts back I was asserting that even un augmented human beings have the capability to eat our collective future light cone. It's a monumental project, yes, with probably hundreds of years before the first starships leave. But once they do our future descendents would be expanding into the...
An Article on Motherboard reports about Alien Minds by Susan Schneider who claiThe Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots. The article is crosslinked to other posts about superintelligence and at the end discusses the question why these alien robots leave us along. The arguments puts forth on this don't convince me though.