Norvig has written criticism about specific ideas that Chomsky uttered in some convention (which are also reflected in some of his written works on natural languages and their computational models).

But Chomsky's contribution to linguistics in general and computational linguistics in particular goes well beyond anything like that, e.g. [1]. I'm not sure, but I suspect that linguistics and computational linguistics where unrelated fields before Chomsky tied them together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

You are minimizing the criticism, which isn't just about some utterance at a convention, it's about the core premise on which Chomsky's entire work rests, namely determinism. And more generally, that success of a model should be tested empirically rather than that it should "provide insight" in some abstract way. There is no doubt that Chomsky has done great work in the area of formal languages, it's just that the relationship with natural language is not as strong as initially hoped.

The scientific pedigree of Chomsky is beyond doubt. From a purely academic POV, with all respect due to Norvig, they are in a different league.

(that does not mean that Norvig may be wrong and Chomsky right on that point you are quoting. It seems you're suggesting that Chomsky is not a great linguist because he disagress with Norvig - that would be a mistake).