I don't know why it appeals to people. Has Christianity infected people with a desire for personal immortality? Are people inured to flushing billions and billions down the drain on biomedical research?
Another issue is that humans aren't that great anyway. The "game of life" is really about statistical inference and people aren't that good at it -- the success of Las Vegas proves it. If you can eliminate the systematic biases that people make dealing with uncertainty, you can make intelligence which is qualitatively superhuman, not just quantitatively superhuman.
It's much more believable that steady progress will be made on emulating and surpassing human faculties. This won't be based on any one particular methodology (symbol processing, neural nets, Bayesian networks) but will be based on picking and choosing what works. Progress is going to be steady here because progress means better systems each step of the way.
Sure, the Richard Dreyfuses will be with us each step of the way and will diminish our accomplishments... and they might still be doing so long after we're living in a zoo.