That's not really less impressive; if this pattern matcher did as good a job at some sort of acquisition/generation task (no poverty of stimulus argument here..

That's not really less impressive; if this pattern matcher did as good a job at some sort of acquisition/generation task (no poverty of stimulus argument here...) and figured out the rules in a productive fashion, that's still really cool. Strong universality in a super-Chomskyan manner (ie, all universal features are available from the acquisition of A language) would be... neat, too, but I wouldn't expect it.