>That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word.

This interpretation takes things too far away from how LLMs are constituted and so misses important explanatory power. The issue of counting letters in a word isn't about an ability to spell, it's about the nature of one's perception. We perceive words as sequences of individual letters. LLMs do not. I can ask you to tell me how many r's are in some nonsense word sequence and you're fully capable of doing that. LLMs do not see sequences of letters so they are intrinsically at a disadvantage for this kind of question. But this says nothing about its capacity for intelligence anymore than not naturally being able to distinguish frequencies of photons hitting your retina has anything to say about human intelligence.