You're right about AI capabilities being much better in the "ungrounded" realm (like writing sonnets), but I would revise the statement a little to be more accurate.

AI systems are quite good at perception in a traditional sense (e.g. determining a red ball is in the sensor receptive field), but once actual cognition about how the red ball relates to the world around it becomes important, current approaches are limited.

I would argue that the first wave of perception is solved much more completely than the ability to reason about complex interactions of objects grounded in the physical world.

Disclaimer: I am a robotics research scientist