Not sure how that's a counterpoint, replicants are supposed to be just kind of mildly genetically adjusted humans grown in vats aren't they? People act towards them like they are robots because it's easier to mentally justify a slave underclass that way.
It's a counterpoint because nobody has seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or c-beams in the dark near the Tanhaeuser (okay, writing that is weird because a-umlaut by itself is fine to write as ae, but a-umlaut-u is pronounced more like 'oy'), yet despite nobody having experienced those things the speech is still famously evocative.