Is that not one of the counter-arguments? You're disagreeing of what Searle determines to be "intelligence." We don't understand how consciousness works, what it's like to be a bat, or how this emergent property came to be. It's why it's necessary to define the terms, then prove them wrong or right. If you disagree with the definitions, that's fine. There is no agreement on what constitutes intelligence.
Again, you keep mentioning intelligence but you talk more like you're talking about awareness/'understanding'/semantics. I agree that these are tricky things to define precisely but there is a reason they are different words. It's also odd considering you mentioned 'blindsight' which is a whole book about the idea that you could have intelligence but not awareness (something I am not sure is a coherent concept, personally).
And yeah, part of it does seem to stem from disagreement about definitions. To me Searle seems to assume much more in his definitions as obvious than he explicitly states, which is why the Chinese room seems like such a non-argument from my point of view.
