I think to a large extent the focus on gaming is more about the low hanging fruit and about what can translate into immediate business.
What do I mean by that?
Well I mean to say that there are no experiences you talk of that currently work on a screen. i.e. nobody turns on their computer screen to start a video of a sundown backdrop to create a romantic moment to have dinner with their partner. But millions of people turn on their screen to have the gaming experience you describe. The reason probably is that the former requires an insane degree of realism, and a screen, or even the first iterations of VR, just aren't good enough. Whereas the latter, gaming, can be immersive with much lower standards, as it has been from e.g. games 20 years ago to games today.
So the low hanging fruit for immediate business opportunities are probably games, and you can immediately get millions of people excited about that.
But getting people excited to go on vacation and take a walk on the beach requires more than just visual immersion. It means feeling sand beneath your feet. Or in the Parisian cafe you mentioned, simply interacting with an actual other human being, physically, holding hands, and seeing that other person you're in the cafe with with as realistically as in real life, mimicking their exact movements, as anything less immediately hits you with the realisation that you're looking at a virtual 3d model of your girlfriend.
Beyond that, I think you're writing this from a perspective of a ridiculously one-sided, self-selecting personal experience.
Of course if you're going to visit a gaming company, you're not just going to find people disproportionately passionate about games, but you'll find people trying to focus on gaming products.
After all if you'd gone to an architectural company and they demo'd a business meeting where they showed the new building design to a client, and you spent 30 minutes after talking about how it'd be so cool to shoot orcs in VR, what do you think they'd say or think? They'd just go right back to talking about their company's use of VR, architecture.
Yes VR needs diverse uses and will have them. What I'm seeing is VR being talked about in education, in health care, in architecture, in cinema, in completely new semi-gaming experiences (i.e. exploring the world as a bird [0]), in porn, in sports, in business/communications. I feel you're writing this as if nobody is open to that, or exploring those things. While it is true there is a focus on gaming, I also think that this is definitely a 'no-brainer' billion dollar industry that can start shipping serious, AAA class games within 1-2 years. Particularly because VR technology is so very closely tied to the skill sets and expertise of gaming companies. Whereas say getting in education, you won't find deep expertise there to start creating top schools whose courses on say history consists half out of VR, and when it finally does happen, the history VR course content probably heavily leans on technology and learnings from the gaming's industry's experiences with VR, hell they may even commission gaming companies to build it with them in cooperation. Which is why I don't think the focus on gaming is all that crazy, it makes a lot of sense business/expertise wise, and will probably create a tide that lifts all boats in other areas of VR.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLHIusLWOc