How I feel about autistic people? That's quite the question you've got there. Let's see...
Well, first off, I actually used to be friends with someone with a form of autism, don't know how severe it was, but I definitely know how I had to adjust the way I acted. Since this was from 5th to 7th grade (which means I was 10 and it lasted till I was 12), I was still reasonably young, and hadn't really heard the term autism. This girl was also not diagnosed at the time, since she would get that in 7th grade, when she was taken out of "normal school" and into a special one, and we stopped talking.
Anyways, I was her only friend, and while she was somewhat nice (like, average, I suppose), she could not take sarcasm and irony, and would therefore hit me (not that hard, but it still hurt) until I apologized if I made the mistake of using sarcasm or if I joked around. She mostly refused to talk to anyone else, and I had to be rather straight forward, if I wanted her to do something or tell her that her parents had called and asked her to come home and so on. I also spent a lot of time learning about her hobbies, and not really mentioning my own at all (that's how I got into anime and manga and stuff, though I probably would have regardless because of my older brothers).
It was... peculiar, and certainly the time when I learned more about how to deal with people individually. She could be rude, very directly, or in a sorta wishy-washy fashion, though I quickly learned to bite my tongue. How I managed to deal with her at all is beyond me, considering the fact that I likely had rather severe anger issues as a child, yet never got angry with her. Then again, all of the issues and so on included, she was still my friend, and we had a lot of fun times. I was never actually told she was autistic and that was the reason she dropped out until a few months later, when I had learned what autism was, and told my mother this girl was one, at which point she went: "Yeah, that's what they found out."
So, I suppose what I'm trying to say with this story-thingy is that she was somewhat typical case of not quite high-functioning (but still able to interact with people, mostly) autistic individual, and that there was certainly a lot of things I had to do to even make her listen to what I was saying, and to ensure I didn't make her upset. However, I'd never consider her to be anything less than anyone else.
Even when comparing the friendship to other people I've met, there's a remarkable similarity in how you have to act, make sure you only interact with some people in certain ways, be direct rather than indirect and so on, if less obviously so. People react to things differently, and the most useful approach is to deal with them in their preferred way. Autistic or not, people are weird as fuck.
However, that said, I also cannot take people who is somewhere on the autistic spectrum serious when they say that they're the "next phase", or, if they have a high IQ, try to use it to say they're smarter than everyone else. It's like, no, IQ doesn't matter that much, it can be trained to increase scores, and many people do that. I've got a reasonable IQ (around 130 or whatever, I took an official one when I was younger because of anger issue things but I can't remember the exact number), but I'd certainly never try to claim that it means that I'm more intelligent than those with a lower IQ. There is a bunch of different aspects to take into consideration, the way you interact with people among those.
TL;DR
Autistic people are certainly a bit peculiar, but so are everyone else, in their own way. The ones who can't take care of themselves I can't actually speak for, having never met one such individual, but still, everyone's a person. Oh, and also, there's no one test to measure people's intelligence, it depends on a whole lot of aspects.