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An interesting thesis, but I think your optimism about people's learning capacities comes from lack of experience; and I don't think the hardware analogy gets us far.
" There don't really seem to be humans who tower above us in terms of their ability to soak up new information and process it." — this has not been shown for people in general.
"My understanding was just based on my own experience, which is probably biased." Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you have not spent much time with people who have difficulty learning to read, or to add up, or to remember what they seemed to learn yesterday. Trying to learn calculus is worlds away from them — not because of lack of exposure, but because even much simpler things are very very hard for them.
I suppose you can cast them as having 'broken parts', but I don't think that helps. They are people. They have much lower abilities to learn. Therefore, humans have a wide range of abilities to learn.
Trying to understand human thought by looking at AI — and vice versa — is interesting. But the map is not the territory, in either case.
We do not know in what ways people's 'hardware' differs. It is not hardware + software as we understand those things — it is wetware, and most of how intelligence, and learning, emerge from that are unknown. So we cannot say that the 'same' hardware produces different results: we do not have a useful way of defining "the same".