What's fundamentally different about AR/VR is that it lets you do that... while being anywhere.
But! The cost of doing it (putting on the goggles) is a direct and serious degradation of your physical experience of wherever you physically are.
So we have a device that's key value proposition is -- it lets you have your nice home media experience, out in the world, at the cost of losing the sensation of the world.
... but then why do I want to do that out in the world, instead of at home, on the couch, like Apple's demos are?
... and if I'm doing it on the couch, it has to compete directly with high fidelity existing solutions.
The mobile component is effectively worthless, until the hardware is capable of augmenting physical reality instead of muffling it. (Read: magic AR eyeglasses)
There does exists one very particular type of user for whom the above is valuable: the business traveler.
But that's not enough volume (especially now) to meaningfully contribute to Apple's revenue.
If I were Apple, I would have taken a page out of Blackberry/Bloomberg's success book and made a flagship launch app a very polished "Vision Pro iMessage, with 3d presence" and worked the social network angle. Call any important person during business hours, with presence, instantly, would be fundamentally different. (Especially with an AI agent if they're unavailable)
Maybe it does to you, maybe a lot of people, but calling it degradation is still a subjective call.
I agree there are some people that want it (I am one of those people, Beatsaber changed my life). The issue is the number of those people isn’t that large yet. I know this because pretty much all of my friends and family that tried my Index have said “wow that’s really cool!” and later none of them go buy a headset. It’s just not compelling enough to buy for most normal people yet.
VR has proven itself pretty much only in VR racing and VR flying, where it provides an impossible to compete with improvement in experience, but at a huge cost and COMMITMENT. It takes effort to put on a headset, set aside some space, and commit to being "away from reality" for a bit
But, sure, fundamentally different: being able to surround yourself with any environment you want. Being able to navigate that environment with physical movement. Seeing a movie that exists in a sphere around you.
You may not want those things, just like my mom could not understand why anyone would want a smartphone, but that does not mean other people get no value.