It's not just the pretraining, it's the entire scaffolding between the user and the LLM itself that contributes to the illusion. How many people would continue assuming that these chatbots were conscious or intelligent if they had to build their own context manager, memory manager, system prompt, personality prompt, and interface?
I agree 100%. Most people haven't actually interacted directly with an LLM before. Most people's experience with LLMs is ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or any of the other tools that automatically handle context, memory, personality, temperature, and are deliberately engineered to have the tool communicate like a human. There is a ton of very deterministic programming that happens between you and the LLM itself to create this experience, and much of the time when people are talking about the ineffable intelligence of chatbots, it's because of the illusion created by this scaffolding.
If instead of a chat interface we simply had a "complete the phrase" interface, people would understand the tool better for what it is.