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"Computers don't have the millenia of history, culture, civilization, government, literature, technology, economics and religion, highly attuned to their circumstances, abilities and limitations, that have been required to turn humans from small bands of roving tribes into the huge nation states and thriving world economy we have now."

Humans don't have that either, at first. They require an extensive period of absorption and integration before it becomes a part of their sensory gestalt. For a computer mind, the absorbing might come a little more easily, and the integration with a great deal more difficulty.

Boiling this down, you are essentially saying the same thing that Kurzweil is saying.

Humans are self-programming multifunction organisms.

Machines are externally programmed single-purpose devices.

So combining the two, with a transparent, intuitive interface, we create a self-programming entity with undefined capabilities.

Now, if the design function of the computer is to find information and make correlations, then the human would appear to be unusually bright and resourceful.

That may be exactly what Kurzweil is anticipating.

Kurzweil is saying more than that. He is not saying that technology will augment humans making as you say the human to "appear to be unusually bright and resourceful.".

He is saying that intelligence will vastly overrun humans, on a scale and capacity trillions and trillions larger and more powerful than human civilization.

Humans will be to this post singularity intelligence as chemical molecules are to humans.

I found some useful quotes from Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology on the web page http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=13&t=7814&s= :

Epoch Five:: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence. Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch. It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremely slow connections.
The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to act on our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.
Epoch Six:: The Universe Wakes Up. I will discuss this topic in chapter 6, under the heading ".. on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos." In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation (based on limits we will discuss in chapter 3) to spread out from its origin on Earth.

Like most trends, they start out seeming to be linear, then seem to become exponential, then cap off. It's the famous 'S' curve:

Overly timid prognosticators early in the trend project the linear growth, and undershoot. Overly optimistic prognosticators in the increasingly steep part of the trend project continuing exponential growh, and overshoot.

Kurzweil is a classic case of the overshooter.