This is often overlooked but it's the only approach that is pretty much guaranteed to succeed given enough time. That said, it's also likely that AGI will come about way earlier from another approach (just as planes came before the "robot birds").

While I agree this leads to haunting outcomes. e.g. If we create a successful interface then whats the point of building our own digital pastiches if we can just strap in the real thing?

Check out OpenWorm. They're trying to reverse engineer the simplest organism with a nervous system, a nematode with 302 neurons. They're making progress, but not very fast. That approach is going to be a long haul.