I believe that quote was in reference to the Rift DK1, which had a 1280x800 full persistence, slow response panel but pretty poor panel utilization. The usable resolution per eye was something below 600x600. It was plausible to build a DK1-like headset in 2008. That is, something just good enough to show that compelling gaming content could be created for VR and that a device could be delivered at a consumer price point.
Getting to an actual comfortable consumer-quality product would still have required solving for low-persistence, fast response, higher PPI, and positional tracking. We couldn’t have delivered that in 2008, but if we had DK1 in 2008, we could have pulled it in a few years from the consumer Rift launch in 2016.
Also what always separated the wheat from the chaff in VR, was latency. (That kind of timing.) Naive approaches did not take low latency seriously, causing users to throw up needlessly.
That's not true. The thing that enabled the Rift was the rapid improvement in cell phone screens in the early 2010s. I know because in 2011 I was trying to design a VR headset that was basically the Rift. Readily available screens at that stage were nearly, but not quite, good enough (most were around 720x480 iirc). I spent ages playing around with lens and mirror setups and fixed foveated rendering etc. and came to the conclusion that it wasn't doable (yet).
My failure of imagination was not realising that, while screens in 2011 were inadequate, they were improving in resolution and response time rapidly and were about to cross the threshold from useless to useful.
A year later 1080p screens were the norm and the Rift was a reality, but in 2007 it was a pipe dream.