As an outsider I kind of get the impression that there is a bit of looking-under-the-streetlamp syndrome going on here where world-modelling is assumed to be the most/only important feature because that's what we can currently do well. I got the same impression seeing Jeff Hawkins speaking at a conference recently.
I'm pretty sure that we suck at prediction - compared to evaluation and tree-pruining. Prediction is where our machines need to improve the most.
Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:
"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."
rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.