Handful of things:

• I agree that the meat-people I've met establish a decent reference class to derive prior beliefs about meat-people I haven't yet met, including beliefs about whether they are people in the first place.

• I agree that the same is true about computer programs and mechanical systems, and that consequently I need more evidence to conclude that a mechanical system is a person than to conclude that a biological humanoid system is, and this is perfectly reasonable.

• I agree that simulations are designed to behave like what they simulate, and often take shortcuts, hacks, etc. to doing so as you describe.
  Sometimes the words "simulation" and "emulation" are used to distinguish two different scenarios, with an emulation understood as relevantly homologous while a simulation is merely analogous. That usage would say that you are describing a brain simulation, but not a brain emulation.
  That said, you don't seem to be using the words this way.
  In any case, I agree that it's wise to be skeptical about inferring that an actual person exists based on the behavior of something designed and implemented the way you describe.

• I estimate that creating a non-person simulation that can convincingly simulate a person to a sophisticated audience under a rigorous test protocol is of the same, or higher, order of difficulty as creating a person not made of meat. I could be wrong about that, though, and am open to being convinced otherwise.
  Consequently, if X is a non-meat system that can convincingly simulate a person to a sophisticated audience under a rigorous test protocol, I estimate the likelihood, given X, that X is a person to be the same or higher than the likelihood, given X, that X is a non-person simulation.

• I don't quite understand your answer to my question.
  I assume that you did intend to answer the question, and I infer therefore that your discussions of whether a given mechanical system is intelligent, or whether it's conscious, are in some way related to my question about whether it's a person. My working theory is that you're treating "is conscious" and "is a person" as roughly synonymous, and that you're treating "intelligence" as distinct from both of those.
  Given those assumptions, I infer that you agree with me that it's possible in principle for X to be a person if X is, for example, a program running on a computer. (I'm not certain of this. Come to that, I'm not certain that you intended to answer the question at all.)
  You also seem to be saying that you don't know what evidence would convince you that such a system really was a person, though you know that no test conduct you could conduct in as little as a few centuries could provide such evidence.
  Have I understood that correctly?