You're lucky you have all of your friends close to you. Some of my best friends are a 2 hour plane ride away. This would be great (if they could afford it).

I thought the demo was neat, but I don't quite get this -- how is looking at the cartoon avatars your friends chose possibly going to be more personal than (or even nearly as personal as) video chat, which has been freely available for years on every major platform and allows you to see your friends' actual faces with their actual facial expressions? Is it just anticipation of the avatars eventually getting replaced with a full realistic real-time 3D rendering of your body?

Absolutely. There was a research project last year where they uses sensors built into the visor foam and they could reproduce your emotion based on your face movement. Of course we'll eventually all be scanned into the system and at that stage you can decide to use an avatar or your normal face. The real benefit here is social VR. Being able to co-exist in VR to do your work will be ground breaking.

same here, seems like a gimmick, anyone remembers "frebble"?

It is a good idea

Yeah, i thought it was amazing. It's the predecessor to the Metaverse.