>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.

Technology hardly makes a product.

>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,

You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.

>* They got loads of feedback

Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.

>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.

Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.

>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.

Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.