What I think we are unable to achieve though is the creative beauty of nature.....
Well - beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder and I'm an engineer.
Having said that, you're still right and you don't have to look far for an example; skin is remarkable stuff. (This point was made rather well in Star Trek First Contact.)
What we also cannot do is breathe life into something...... I think that nature will always win on that one
Now that's a really tricky one because you have to start with a good definition of what life actually is. A self-replicating machine would not be beyond the bounds of our current technical ability but would it be 'alive'?
I think I'd have to say "no" to that. To qualify as an artificial life-form it would have to be able to adapt to a changing environment.
So now we build a robot that can do just that. In fact it can do something nature can't. Nature can only modify the next generation. The robot can also modify itself and then retrofit the changes into previous generations.
But is it alive?
Does it know that it's a robot? I suppose it does but --
Can it compose a symphony - or even a three minute pop song?
Can it write a poem? Only so far as getting the rhyme and metre correct!
Can it make love? I seriously doubt it. Data thought he was programmed for this but the Borg queen soon proved him wrong.
Yep! Nature wins that one hands down.