IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.

We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.

"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.