The entire PC gaming industry would beg to differ, which is likely the initial target market. Of course that will change. Also I wouldn't exactly consider my desktop a beast. Form factors are pretty small these days.
Sure, this will be a hot product among PC gamers but they are not the mainstream consumers. I wanted to buy the device for my mom and have her use it. I think the vision should be to bring VR mainstream that is usable by all without technological friction.
Yea, I am sure that is the goal. But in order to provide a clean, seamless experience, you need to render what is roughly 3x the amount of data compared to normal 1080p monitors. You'll also want to make sure you don't have dropped frames as that would have a huge impact in the experience. You need high framerates and responsive feeback so that motion sickness is minimized. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why a high-end graphics card is required. So yes, that is the goal but we can't get there right now.
The mainstream experience will be on high-end smartphones, not PCs. When Carmack and Facebook talk about getting a billion users into VR, this is how they plan to do it.
