So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?

The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.

Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.