The ceiling here is going to be incredibly high, much higher than the level of play that people are capable of, even when restricted to a single window.
Part of the difficulty here is describing what a 'fair' match might be. Specifically, I think fairness has to do with a goal many people have for AI: to improve human play. The strategies in Chess or Go that were employed could conceivably be used by human players. There aren't any hard restrictions preventing humans from learning from that play, even if the AI is entirely superior.
It would follow that a 'fair' SCII match would employ strategies that humans could implement. Making extra workers, for instance, might be a real lesson from AlphaStar play. The insane stalker micro, however, could never be done by a human.
From this perspective, I think the important takeaways were:
* The AI leaned heavily on super-human stalker micro.
* The AI had some strategic blind-spots, namely the immortal harass.
* The APM comparison isn't terribly meaningful; a lot of human APM is spammy/twitchy button presses that doesn't do all that much, whereas the AI can presumably make each action count. There were also AlphaStar APM spikes that likely go along with the stalker-micro issue.
When AlphaGo first one, people said it wasn't fair because it was running on a whole cluster of computers. Well, within not much time at all, it was good enough to run on a single computer and still beat top humans. We are dealing with exponential progress here. The writing is on the wall.
It absolutely does matter whether the AI can use obviously super-human techniques, because then it's not nearly as interesting for human observers. I'd much rather watch an AI that was a strategic genius that won despite being hamstrung in terms of micro/techniques.
> There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be.
Who's claiming this?
Different problems have different difficulties. Solving simple problems quickly doesn't mean we'd also be able to just as easily solve the hard problems. Often the comparably simpler problems have the best reward/effort ratio and thus make quick progress, which doesn't need to be the case for hard problems.
If you had bet against AIs reaching parity with top human players in any previous game, whether it be Checkers, Chess, Go, etc., you'd have lost. I see no reason why StarCraft II should be any different.
We can reconvene in the comments here a year from now and see where AlphaStar is then.