Yep - the "value" of a Turing-capable system has been questioned for a while now. We watched Markov chains and IRC bots clear the Turing test on a regular basis in the mid-2000s, and all we got out of that was better automated scamming.

Even now, as we have fully capable conversational models we don't really have any great immediate applications. Our efforts at making them "think" is yielding marginal returns.