"Great minds think alike"

So, I've been thinking about this one for a while. It's a flip-flopper. I feel like a fish. Or like John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004. Whatever works. Mainly I've flipped and flopped because I'd like to think of myself as a smart cookie, and when I find myself with the same joke as another person I admire and respect, this phrase comes to mind. That said...

What's going on in the phrase is the concept of smart people thinking smartly together, in unison, in sync. What's there to pick on in that though, is this idea that perhaps great minds don't think alike because they're on such differing plains. Like, Albert Einstein was clearly brilliant, but so is Alec Baldwin, that doesn't mean they think alike. Doesn't it by virtue of their own separate existences actually mean that great minds are great because they are unique?

They cease to be great if they were all thinking the same way.

And if you're saying it to be funny, which I have, you're merely making the joke that you were thinking in unison, not that you actually had marvelous thoughts.