You can connect any oculus quest device to your desktop and use it just like Vive with steamvr aka peripheral. It is an officially supported functionality. They didnt remove it by creating Quest, they just added standalone mode in addition to the "peripheral" mode.

If anything FB has greatly improved this. Airlink is a literal step-change improvement to VR that allows the user to have a totally wireless PC VR experience, something that was assumed to be very difficult/impossible over existing wireless standards.

but you can't create lock-in and an app store out of that.