Now I fully agree with what you said.

Cheat is a absolutely relative! How can we tell that something which appears to be intelligent is not? The parallels to how human infants acquire knowledge are strikingly similier. Parents are the engineers and the environment is the data set which the infant is getting trained on.

We need to take a better look at what the Turing test is doing to answer your question of „could a human pass it“. Turings approach is not really to measure intelligence, intelligence definitely is a spectrum, his test results in a binary yes/no conclusion for a reason though. He believed that 70% of humans won’t be able to identify a machine through a 5min dialogue until the year 2000.

His test is not a scientifically important milestone, passing the Turing test, or declaring a machine to be intelligent is not yielding any new knowledge. The passing of the Turing test is marking the point in time in which humans must accept the fact that a majority of them won’t be able to tell the difference of remotely communicating with a human or a machine. (The latest point at which governments need to work on additional legislation and regulation etc)

So as you correctly pointed out, the test cannot really be cheated. But the test can be passed without the need for intelligence. A dog is intelligent but could not pass it. Passing it definitively requires something to seem intelligent for a human.

StarTrek has many episodes which tackle this highly ethical topic of when do humans accept something to be intelligent and when do we accept that something is sentient. The android Commander Data is definitively intelligent, he is acquiring knowledge and applies it in the real work. Question about Data is, is he sentient? They impressively show how difficult it is to identify intelligence and even something as seemingly obvious as sentience. There is an episode which concludes a crystalline rock to be intelligent based on it emitting energy patterns which can be considered to be an encoded try of communication.

Humans may look intelligence straight into the face and state it’s not intelligent. That’s because we do not understand our own intelligence enough yet. My point of view is that AI will help us understand our own intelligence. But until we cannot grasp our own, how can we grasp something else’s? I believe that pushing back will at some point result in a technology which goes over and beyond to make the claim of it being not intelligent completely obsolet. StarTreks Data for example, there is no deniability of its intelligence and interesting enough this leads straight to question of sentience. At least StarTrek is not able to draw a picture which clearly shows the boundary of intelligence and sentience, in their pictures these two things are appearing to correlate. Something which is definitively considered to be intelligent by humans, always appears to be sentient at the same time. (Which imo shows that we need to get a better idea of „intelligence“ before we conclude something is, when we concluded it is intelligent the scientific path „ends“ before we truly understood)