You are making a common conflation when talking about VR. Better specs does not mean better technology. Sure, the Index looks better on paper right now, but in 2-3 years it will be an unthinkable purchase.

There is a limit to how high the resolution can be bumped in order to realistically run on consumer PCs. Oculus knows this and is dumping heaps of money trying to make foveated rendering happen and squeezing every drop of performance they can out of their rendering pipeline. What can Valve do to compete? Not much. They can bump the resolution anyway but then it becomes a device for super high-end PCs. One breakthrough is all it will take to deprecate the Index.

Plus, we're talking about a $1000 device here. This price point locks out a lot of people. Yeah yeah, I've heard it before, Oculus collects data to subsidise costs, whatever. It doesn't matter. Their devices are more competitive and that's what will capture the market.

It might sound like I'm shilling here but I would point you to my original comment. I don't want Oculus to rule. But they're about to put on the crown.