I think if they define intelligence that way, it isn't a very interesting discussion, because we're back to Church-Turing: Either they can show that this actually has an effect on the ability to reason and the possible outputs of the system that somehow exceeds the Turing computable, or those aspects are irrelevant to an outside observer of said entity because the entity would still be able to act in exactly the same way.
I can't prove that you have a subjective experience of feeling emotion, and you can't prove that I do - we can only determine that either one of us acts as if we do.
And so this is all rather orthogonal to how we define intelligence, as whether or not a simulation can simulate such aspects as "actual" feeling is only relevant if the Church-Turing thesis is proven wrong.
There are lots and lots of things that we can't personally observe about the universe. For example, it's quite possible that everyone in New York is holding their breath at the moment. I can't prove that either way, or determine anything about that but I accept the reports of others that no mass breath holding event is underway... and I live my life accordingly.
On the other hand many people seem unwilling to accept the reports of others that they are conscious and have freedom of will and freedom to act. At the same time these people do not live as if others were not conscious and bereft of free will. They do not watch other people murdering their children and state "well they had no choice". No they demand that the murderers are punished for their terrible choice. They build systems of intervention to prevent some choices and promote others.
It's not orthogonal, it's the motivating force for our actions and changes our universe. It's the heart of the matter, and although it's easy to look away and focus on other parts of the problems of intelligence at some point we have to turn and face it.
Church-Turing doesn't touch upon intelligence nor consciousness. It talks about "effective procedures". It claims that every effectively computable thing is Turing computable. And effective procedures are such that "Its instructions need only to be followed rigorously to succeed. In other words, it requires no ingenuity to succeed."
Church-Turing explicitly doesn't touch upon ingenuity. It's very well compatible with Church-Turing that humans are capable of some weird decision making that is not modelable with the Turing machine.
I can't prove that you have a subjective experience of feeling emotion, and you can't prove that I do - we can only determine that either one of us acts as if we do.
And so this is all rather orthogonal to how we define intelligence, as whether or not a simulation can simulate such aspects as "actual" feeling is only relevant if the Church-Turing thesis is proven wrong.