It's actually already possible to train convolutional network-like models to distinguish between a variety of dogs, cats etc with precision that is pretty much super human. The real problem is getting high-quality training data without involving tons of domain experts that would tells us with high degree of confidence whether a given image is of a specific breed of dog (getting millions of images of dogs is easy, so is building a classifier).
It's not immediately obvious to me how useful such an app would be btw. Unless I of course misunderstood what a "real life pokedex app" is :).
Yes, though I think on public benchmarks this is still not the case. There's a dog-breed classification problem in this year's Fine-Grained challenge (https://sites.google.com/site/fgcomp2013/) so we'll see in December!
It's not immediately obvious to me how useful such an app would be btw. Unless I of course misunderstood what a "real life pokedex app" is :).