The funny thing about your thought experiment, as well as the infamous "chinese room", is that you could actually turn it on it's head. The conclusion is that consciousness doesn't matter.
If you divorce all the products of consciousness from consciousness itself, then you could say consciousness doesn't matter. Also, any particular product of consciousness is easily produced without it. Given that evolution stumbled on consciousness, I think it's plausible that within the constraints of biology, consciousness is the simplest way to produce the behavior we associate with it.
