Theres a lot of people who keep saying 'a dog is a dog' etc...
A dog is rather uniquely, a species evolved alongside humans and its unlikely either species would have turned out quite the way they have without the other.
We did not domesticate dogs, but it is almost certainly the 'furbaby' type people among early man who favoured and thereby selected for cute features, large eyes, interesting coat colours or ears etc, once the process of selecting for friendliness/against fear/aggression had changed the wolf ancestors appearance sufficiently for those features to appear.
A dog experiences emotion, they are less complex emotions than ours but they experience fear, joy, pleasure, anxiety, and even conflicted emotions..
Dogs have an awareness of self, which for a long time we thought only humans and great apes were capable of (because dogs tend to fail the mirror test, but dogs are not visually brilliant, using scent however, its a different story entirely!).
Dogs can learn abstract concepts, I have taught my lurcher (and far better trainers than I have done this plenty) to differentiate between large/small, left of/right of, up and down, with a variety of objects and in a variety of locations.
For those mocking dogs sleeping with their owners and yet saying 'a dog is a dog'.... dogs are a gregarious social species, asking a dog to sleep entirely alone shut in a room some distance from the rest of the social group is utterly alien, completely un-dog like. If you want to go with 'dog is a dog, should be treated like a dog' then you should let your dog sleep in a big ole pile with the rest of the group, in your bed!
Dogs lick faces to communicate, its also a bond building interaction between group members - I am not a huge fan for the reasons people have mentioned but I don't mind a polite (dry) lick, I understand its purpose and intent 'we are a group, we belong together, i want to be with you'. Again if you want to have your dogs behave like dogs, face licking is a part of that...
Dogs eat dog food - well only for the last 80 - 100 years they have. Before that, dogs just ate... food. Much of it food we didn't really want, but it's still all food.
So maybe give the 'furbaby' (not a term I have ever used, but my dogs are more likely collectively referred to as 'hairy freeloaders') people a break, because you 'dog is a dog' people are in many cases forcing your dogs to behave like something very undog like - I think dogs are dogs only when thats actually convenient to you, and dog is a piece of property you can shut away or suppress the behaviour of the rest of the time.