I guess the original point was that machine learning is nothing like actual intelligence, it is closer to a process of artificial model creation than anything else. "Artificial intelligence" is a term that's completely abused these days.
Well, machine learning might not enlighten us to understand actual intelligence. There is no reason why actual intelligence can't simply be modeled by (and function like) a giant neural network. Many of us hope there is some form of symbolic intelligence deeper than just stochastic models or neural nets, but we really don't know.
> Machine Learning was certainly considered a part of AI then
That's part of the problem. The definition of AI is extremely loose. If by AI we actually mean "replicating the process of human intelligence through algorithms" then Machine Learning is certainly not it.
That's a question of terminlogy. Nowadays AI seems to include machine learning as a subfield. It doesn't matter much. But AI is a sexy term again (after the years of the AI winter), and companies market machine learning under AI now. Also, classic AI books now include ML, not just symbolic stuff, logic, planning and graph search.