In Turing's original paper, the Test is intended to be a "new form" of the question "can machines think?". It is explicitly a test of the machine's intelligence, not of humans'.
It test the machines intelligence under the same naive assumption that was held about beating humans in chess. It was a different time they thought about it differently.
Turing first made the test to ask whether computers can think but changed it to a much more concise and answerable question.
"Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"
