I would argue that the Apple Vision Pro is a rare example of something that WAS inevitable BECAUSE of the misbehavior described. Every large VR company COULD have just created and iterated on the basic design that Palmer Luckey (aside: who is also a villain here, too; don't read to much into the name-drop) forced everyone to recognize as viable, slowly developing the technology in the organic way other computing platforms came about. Instead, they all played a decade-long game of chicken, trying to bait their rivals into being the Xerox or Rio of the technology, to their... well, Apple. That is, letting them do all the hard work in standing up the tech's basic user experience, use cases, etc., then swooping in with a polished product offering.

None of these companies wanted to get Apple'd, and they (particularly Facebook) did everything they could to pay lip service to developing VR without funding anything really groundbreaking (or even obvious). Apple finally had to release something after years of promising shareholders that they weren't going to get left behind in the market, and with nothing material to skim off of competitors, the AVP is what we got.

Until Apple figures out how to dig up and purify its deep-rooted cultural rot, and learn how to actually innovate independently, every halfway-aware competitor is going to hold back development on anything they might want to appropriate. In the meantime, we all lose.