Isn't there a huge problem with the resolution of the rift/vive being that of a monitor but it's got to render a monitor at distance thus losing pixels and being equivalent to an old vga monitor?

Looks like the screen in the video is about 1/3 of the view size in each axis. Rift resolution is 1080 x 1200 per eye, so about 360 x 400. That's even worse than VGA.

The Gear VR use your smartphone screen, not the Rift. That's a resolution of 1440 x 2560 for a Samsung Galaxy S7, which mean 1440 x 1280 per eye. The optic is also made to have more pixel in the center than the border of the viewport. I have no doubt that you can have a resolution similar to VGA with no issue and even better than that if you use a bigger screen. I'm pretty sure none of us had any trouble working in VGA back in the day either.

That... is awesome. Having done a Rift demo, that's the closest I can conceive of (right now) as real-life wizardry - a terminal for (virtual) reality.