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While the sapience/sentience debate has been going on in this thread for a while, as the resident Pokemon lore master I feel the need to weigh in. The best evidence for Pokemon intelligence is, as you implied, PMD. They can form societies, primitive but functional ones, as well as use some tools, in spite of the wide array of limbs each Pokemon has. However PMD is weird since there's an implication that humans used to and will exist, with a lesser implication that some are still out there. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the main games, where they're arguably the most animal-like. If you're the kind of person that thinks it's alright to fuck a computer, you might find it alright to fuck Metagross, if that interests you. The anime does fall more in the middle sometimes, and has a lot more blatant exceptions than the games, but overall they're just more expressive animals there. Usually Pokemon stories can be split up into these three groups, more or less (other examples of the three, in order, are Pokepark, Adventures/Special, and Hey You Pikachu!). On the topic of the Sinnoh myths, that implies that all myths are true in Pokemon, which is incredibly dubious to begin with, especially after we have a counterexample in Gen 5. Now, there can be elements of truth to a myth, but between years of bad story-telling and the telephone game, who knows what the actual event was. Veilstone's Myth was always the one that interested me, personally, but that's another story, for another time.
