I have not read Kuhn's work, but I have read some Ptolemy, and if I recall correctly he is pretty careful not to claim that the circles in his astronomy are present in some mechanical sense. (Copernicus, on the other hand, literally claims that the planets are moved by giant transparent spheres centered around the sun!)

In his discussion of his hypothesis that the planets' motions are simple, Ptolemy emphasizes that what seems simple to us may be complex to the gods, and vice versa. (This seems to me to be very similar to the distinction between concepts that are verbally simple and concepts that are mathematically simple, which EY and others have referenced repeatedly here and at OB.) And while the device of the Equant* is fairly simple mathematically, it would raise so many mechanical complications that Copernicus rejected it, not because it's inaccurate, but because he considered it too mechanically complicated.

Ptolemy also tended to demonstrate equivalence between two ways of accounting for observations, which again suggests that he was not trying to describe the mechanics of the planets' motion, but rather only the mathematics of their motion.

I am not familiar with later Geocentric astronomy, and it may for all I know be the case that later thinkers thought that the epicycles had their own existence and moved the planets mechanically, but the history of astronomy is a little more complex than the popular account of the Copernican revolution would suggest.

If anything, Copernicus's insight was to permit the mathematics to inform his physical judgment rather than the other way around. Ptolemy rejected the heliocentric hypotheses intentionally and explicitly on common-sense grounds. Copernicus permitted the famous Ptolemaic coincidences (e.g. the fact that all the planets' epicycles tend to follow the mean motion of the sun) to suggest the sun as a more simple and natural center.

*The Equant is a device for describing planets whose uneven motion relative to the earth cannot be adequately accounted for by eccentricity and epicycles. In essence, Ptolemy assigns three centers to the planet's motion. One is the earth (the point of observation), another is the center of the circle the planet describes in space (the eccenter), and the third is the point with respect to which the angular motion of the planet is constant (i.e. the planet would appear to be revolving at a uniform rate if observed from this third point).