They actually seem pretty different to me. Searle's original claim was that computer programs won't have "intentionality" (which seems like a confused/useless concept but I haven't digged into it enough to be sure) even if they exhibit intelligent input-output behavior. Kaj's steelman claims that systems based on crude manipulations of suggestively named tokens likely won't be intelligent, whereas your (cousin_it's) steelman claims that a system may not be conscious even if it exhibits human-like (and hence intelligent) input-output behavior. These seem to go in very different directions.
cousin_it, aren't you forgetting that the rules of the Chinese Room are different than those of Turing's imitation game? While Turing does not let you in the other test room, Searle grants you complete access to the code of the program. If you could really work out a (Chinese) brain digital upload, you could develop a theory of consciousness/intelligence/intentionality from it. Unfortunately, artificial neural networks bear no connection to the brain, like ELIZA bears no connection to a human!
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!