Don't confuse awareness with self-awareness please.
You can't have self-awareness without awareness, so it doesn't really change anything to what I wrote. A vending machine is aware of its own contents and of what coins are given to it.
I think awareness is overrated. You defined it as (or compared it to) being awake, but in reality is the ability to react differently to differently things. Furniture isn't aware because it won't flee when your house is on fire. A home alarm is aware because it will react to intruders but not to furniture.
There's simply degrees of awareness, and humans have a higher degree of it (in general) as their creations, although we often create machines that are more aware of certain specific things than us : my oscilloscope can detect and record a voltage spike of a few millivolts over a high-frequency signal. The best I can do on my own is lick a battery to tell if it still has some juice.
As Electric Buddha suggests in his post, awareness may be a different thing for other species than us, and I think it certainly is. For instance ants are aware of vegetation and certain soil characteristics, but I doubt they are aware of the galaxies.
I'd say awareness is the first step of intelligent behavior : if you're unaware of something, you can't act in response to it. So, again, I'm sticking with Tamalak : awareness is an illusion, it's only a fundamental, inherent mechanism of life such as gathering energy and reproducing.
Nefastor