This is a fair point, there'd likely have to be some comfort sacrificed in terms of heat or weight.

I suppose if push came to shove I'd want minimal computer hardware in the headset that could handle wireless tethering but would be willing to give up standalone usage.

Well there is a reason for this: Tethering is what valve wants to get rid of and it’s obvious to me that it needs to be gone to make VR viable. I’ll explain a bit of why without making a whole post.

My first thing is just that many people have avoided the Quest due to its ecosystem being owned by Meta. And the platform is very closed down. So your current options are either to buy an extremely expensive PC >$500 and a PC headset of at least $500 to $1000 and then run PC VR. This is cost prohibitive and Valve knows it. The Deckard would do the same thing the steam deck did for PC gaming. Make it approachable.

Second point is that VR games vary in experiences. Some are high fidelity. But many of the good ones aren’t. The fidelity is in the interaction and not the graphics. That type of thing is what the Quest excels at and what Deckard will do even better at.

And then I think it confines developers into developing for a set spec of hardware which again solves many of the inherent PC challenges. Verified for Deckard could be a thing.

Lastly it enables wireless streaming which will probably be enabled by WiFi 7 standards. Even with a 6e standard router, the bandwidth is pretty good. And to most people, they won’t need a tether to enjoy it anymore.