> Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'merely' being an emergent property of large networks.

I would disagree with this description. An "emergent property of large networks" would be something that just appears when you wire together a large network.

To get intelligent behavior, it's not sufficient to wire together a large neural network. You also need to use an optimizer to train it on a large data set.