I like the flight analogy too. Extending it further, we failed to build flying machines by blindly copying bird design when we had no idea how bird flight actually worked, and we successfully built heavier-than-air powered flying machines when we understood how bird flight worked and realised the power-to-weight ratio etc. was such that we'd need a completely different design to get humans into the air. I believe it'll be a similar case with AI and neuroscience - we're unlikely to get general AI until we have a pretty solid understanding of the way human intelligence works, but when we do we'll probably find that the artificial form of intelligence will have to be designed differently due to inherent constraints.