Is there any good way for me to try this out without buying a $1500 piece of hardware? My instinct is that Oculus' VR vision doesn't make any sense, but I want to try it out before being confident that my instinct is correct.
Thanks to FB you can buy $400 "Meta Quest 2" and experience like 95% of good VR content. Yeah it somewhat worse than Valve Index for VR enthusiasts, but it also much cheaper.
I recently got the HP Reverb G2 to explore VR. It's not that much more than the Quest and has the benefit of being Zuckerberg- and spyware-free.
If you do get a vr headset tether it to a pc and try some actual quality content.
Or, if you have a Quest, forget the tether and go full wireless PCVR, like the rest of us.
Wireless works surprisingly well, you are right.
This is the way. Currently playing through the HL2 VR Mod using wireless PCVR. It's amazing.