> It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience.
This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad general audience.
(It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D, because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why wouldn't VR want to expand into the niche TV fills today?)
This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience now" to actually having the VR experience, the less likely it is that it will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually" is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual experience more formal is swimming against the tide.