If you give it an analytic prompt like "turn this baseball box score into an entertaining outline" it will reliably act as a translator because all of the facts about the game are contained in the prompt.
If you give it a synthetic prompt like "give me quotes from the broadcasters" it will reliably acts as a synthesizer because none of the facts of the transcript are in the prompt.
This ability to perform as a synthesizer is what you are identifying here as "good enough to make people squee and not notice that the output is wrong but not good enough to get the right answer", which is correct, but sometimes fiction is useful!
If all web pages were embedded in ChatGPT's 1536 dimensional vector space and used for analytic augmentation then a tool would more reliably be able to translate a given prompt. The UI could also display the URLs of the nearest-neighbor source material was used to augment the prompt. That seems to be what Bing/Edge has in store.
