I don't think they were a missed opportunity. In order for them to 'miss' they had to be 'possible' which they haven't been for a long time. Its only lately where various things have come together to get close. I have followed the 'head mounted display' technology closely since its early inception in the mid-90's as a means of providing military pilots with situational awareness.
The first problem with head mounted displays was resolution. Both in color space and in pixel space. Early displays were monochrome (either green or red based on LED display drivers) and had a roughly 256 x 256 dot pitch. It was ok for targeting reticules and basic instrumentation display (like an artificial horizon). Early work also wanted transparency (look through) displays because there wasn't a way to display what you were looking at in enough fidelity to do both the visual field and the indicator field.
Later a company called Colorado Micro Displays (CMD) came to market and started offering color, but 320 x 200 was the best resolution they could do. Higher resolution displays cost tens of thousands of dollars and were essentially hand crafted out of unobtainum. Direct retinal illumination displays attempted to get past strict display resolution issues (a friend of mine worked on one of the x-y positioning device for doing this, it had 500 angstrom repeatability! And was, as expected, insanely expensive)
It really hasn't been until recently when DLP type systems at sufficient resolution to eliminate the x-y type beam director have come to market. Combined with better LED phosphors to bring the cost of an RGB display with better than VGA (640 x 480) resolution into something practical.
The incessant push to higher resolution phone screens has created the capability to make opaque but high resolution screens which can enable something like the Oculus Rift type displays. That requirement stems from how far away from the eyes you have to put the screen and thus the torque moment that is applied to your head. There was a great system at NASA which used 10" displays but the 'head mounted' part was more like sticking your head into some weird steadycam kind of device.
Finally there is the challenge of both high fidelity and high frequency head orientation technologies. Prior to about 2005 the best you could do was a laser gyro for motion and an accelerometer for inertial reference. Doing that at the necessary frequency (typically 1000 updates per second) didn't become cost effective until about 2009.
Now however, many of the technologies have finally matured to the point where OR can be done in small quantities for perhaps $2K/unit.
A 'game console' is struggles if it costs more then $300. So as a 'controller' option, and even as the 'whole console' option, these sorts of glasses are still about 3 - 5 years from hitting a price point that makes them the 'killer' peripheral. And of course because they aren't here yet, they can't really have 'missed' :-)