That point about AI reminds me of this time I heard China Miéville speak. Someone asked him what it's like to try to imagine an alien intelligence. His response was something along the lines of - we can't, it's impossible for us to imagine something that isn't inherently biased toward our own world and experiences. But even though we will inevitably fail, those failures are pretty damn interesting on their own. Even if we don't make a Turing passing AI, I think so far all our failures have been pretty interesting, and I can't wait to see us fail some more :)
Regarding those 'failures,' here's an even more tempting possibility. In the process of trying to create a 'Turing-passing' AI, we invent/discover a class of transitionary intelligence that somehow defies our current understanding of machine learning/intelligence/consciousness.