Scientifically this is unsatisfying but also if for some reason this turns out to be an engineering dead-end we have a big hole where a concrete theory of intelligence should be, with its components, mechanisms and so forth. And sadly I think this is still the weakest link in AI.
To me it seems a little bit like if you trained architects instead of having a theoretical basis for architecture, you just showed them every building in existence and sent them to work. It may very well work, but if it didn't you have a problem. And even if it did, you'd still want to have an understanding of why it works.
There are a lot of problems that do not have analytical solutions, like the N-body problem. With these problems all you can do is numerical simulation, which is pretty much what modern machine learning is.