> who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games
It remains to be seen how many of these will buy a VR headset. Peripherals have always been a very marginal aspect even on dedicated gaming hardware. If there's an actual killer application (i.e. a must have game) I could see myself buying into it, but as long as the VR "games" are either glorified demos or badly converted regular games that are worse than their non-VR counterpart, I won't spend a cent on it.
Yes all gamers (including phones) is a bigger group than console gamers, but there are still a TON of console gaming households who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games.