Neuromorphic hardware is barking up the wrong tree if you ask me. What excites me is not hardware that works like brains work, but software that does what brains can do. If you want to fly, don't try to build a bird. Build an airplane.
I would agree if the goal is to fly. For some researchers, however, the goal is actually to apply neuromorphic hardware to humans, i.e. to build a bird rather than just to fly.
In a sense, aren't we trying to take inspiration from a model evolved in many million years? We are trying to build an airplane taking inspiration from a bird.
Also, emulating the way brain work can be seen as one of the many paths towards AGI, can't it? Even if, AGI speaking, to my understanding the computation speed is not the problem.
Neural networks are already loosely inspired by the brain. Neuromorphic hardware is taking things too far. Just as airplanes were a better path to flight than ornithopters, iterating on AI techniques that work is a better path to AGI than brain imitation.