> how is staring for hours at a stationary rectangle with miniature information more natural and easy for your neck muscles than having information spread around you in even spacing at a comfortable virtual distance?
Low-pixel displays can't replace high-pixel displays (yet). It's all about the speed your head can move, vs. the speed your eyes can move, vs. the speed your display can refresh.
As a simple test, try holding your head still while moving your eyes back and forth ten times, from one extreme of your FOV to the other. Then try moving your head back and forth ten times to see things beyond your FOV on each side. Two observations when I try this: (1) the eye movement was much faster than the head movement; (2) the head movement was much more tiring.
In fact, eye movement is the fastest thing we can do, and even uses special circuits to reduce latency:
"Saccades are the fastest movements produced by the human body. The peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade reaches up to 900°/s in humans; in some monkeys, peak speed can reach 1000°/s. ... Under certain laboratory circumstances, the latency of, or reaction time to, saccade production can be cut nearly in half (express saccades). These saccades are generated by a neuronal mechanism that bypasses time-consuming circuits and activates the eye muscles more directly."[1]
Head movement apparently maxes out at 500°/s or so, and that's not comfortable to keep up for long. So it's at least twice as fast to access high-resolution information by eye movement as to access the same information at lower res by turning your head. That's the tradeoff between using a fixed monitor at your max comfortable resolution, and using a lower-res head-mounted display.
At the same time, a fixed display (for now) allows you to move your head more rather than less while reading comfortably. A head-mounted display has to update the display in response to your head movement, and a fixed display doesn't.
As a test here, see how fast you can move your head back and forth while reading text on your fixed display. Then see how fast you can move back and forth while reading on your DK2. The second will be slower, because the Oculus has to impersonate a pixel on your virtual display by juggling which physical pixels are used to render it as your head turns. In addition to further throwing away resolution by aliasing your virtual display onto your real display (the virtual text has to look sharp regardless of how it happens to overlap with physical pixels), this means the refresh rate is a limiting factor on how fast you can turn your head and still read. The text which was crisp while your head was still is physically blurred before it even gets to your eye, because the Oculus can't quite keep up with where it should be. That stops being a factor at, say, 1000hz, but we're not there yet.[2]
So on a fixed display, you can actually move and stretch your neck and turn your head without affecting the reading experience; on a virtual display, those movements will blur the text you're trying to read.
I'm very excited about all of the things VR can be -- just saying that one thing it can't be, yet, is a replacement for a high-resolution monitor when you're trying to quickly access lots of text.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
[2] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hol...