[maaku]

Moravec's paradox is not an experimental result. It's just one guys musings on intelligence. It says a lot more about the misguided things people thought about intelligence in the early days of AI than the actual inherent difficulty of achieving human-level AI.

[mannykannot]

According to the linked article, several notable researchers were of the same opinion (and one might also say that relativity was just one guy's musings - though admittedly experimental evidence wasn't long in coming.)

I do, however, agree with your second sentence, and I think the paradox is also weakened by the fact that when 'high-level' mental tasks are computerized (chess-playing, for example), it is often through brute-force calculation that is not a model of how humans use their general intelligence to perform the task.