I dunno. this is a nice story, but at the end of the day an android phone is just a slightly tweaked linux box. The buttons are a little bigger, the small screen is optimized for one window at a time, and there's a pop up keyboard...
They are specifically designing a VR-based window manager here. And it's linux and a community of hackers, and open source. I think you'll see community imitations and tweaks and improvements on the apple formula as an option almost immediately.
I think you've nailed it here. I never thought of it in those terms before, but now that I see it, it's obvious.
It reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of Henry Ford saying that his customers didn't want cars - they wanted faster horses. I think there's something analogous here. If all you are offering is a Linux desktop in VR, you're making faster horses.
When I think about where a novel new VR mode is going to come from, it's either going to be Apple or a research team at a liberal arts college. Technologists can really only solve half the problem.