Some of us are hyper-capable at making educated guesses about people's intentions and even ulterior motives; where we suck is in generating appropriate responses.
Autistic "social skills", like everything else about us, exist on a wide-ass spectrum.
Before an autistic child, or any child, can make guesses about people's intentions, he has to know that such things even exist. If you learn this late then, sure, your responses are going to be different, even problematic (not guided by the inexplicit knowledge other children developed at an earlier stage).
Autistic "social skills", like everything else about us, exist on a wide-ass spectrum.