From my experience working with VR hardware I came away thinking that we're very far away from hitting the required comfort zone for mass appeal. The challenges you outline: UX, comfort are going to be crazy hard to over come and I think there's a lot more work on the hardware side.

Mobile phones offers people a very comfortable and easy UX that blends well with the requirements of the real world, you could say it does it too well as you often see people walking down the street faces glued to their screen and not looking where they're walking.

VR needs the power of immersion, but right now it comes at great cost. The friction of entering and exiting is big, the time between task switching of virtual and real is big.

You mentioned this:

> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there.

You cannot and bring all required tasks into the virtual. You can't quickly check on your dog, grab a drink, glance over to a person in your physical space, grab that note from your desk. We rely heavily on the real world and VR right now presents a big barrier. Phones do not, you can watch a movie on TV and glance at the message that pops up on your phone. Even desktop computing allows you to comfortably multitask by glancing between monitors. Some stuff can bring virtualized into VR windows, but it's limited.

I exited VR in 2018 after a few years of working on it. My conclusion was that we're still too early to get bullish. We still need to overcome some big technological hurdles that bridge the gap between comfortable and complete immersion (100% audio & visual simulation), a blend (AR), and 100% real world. We also needs to better address other immersive factors such as haptics and interfacing, because as you increase the potency in one area (visuals) the requirements in other areas start to rise as the playing field demands completeness or risks breaking that desired immersion level.