The criticism still holds (witness car tactile-vs-touch UX discussions) but a touch keyboard is not worse enough to outweigh the advantages of overall more screen space.

And more importantly, the apple reality distortion field is enough to compensate for small issues like "it has no copy and paste" and "it's missing a keyboard", especially when it had plenty of upsides, like an OS that didn't make you feel like it was written by the lowest bidder, a nice screen (compared to contemporary smartphones) so you wouldn't hate watching videos on it, and iTunes integration, which was leagues better than the niche integrations smartphones had at the time.

The complaints were valid, but they weren't nearly enough to make the device bad.

Now, how many people can spend $3500 on a headset where the main use cases are "watch a movie", when those same people probably also have a really nice TV? Everyone keeps talking about how it's "very interesting" but how many of you have actually tried to watch a movie in a VR headset? It's not comfortable, not just from screen specs, since those don't really matter. The weight and face gasket suck to have on. You can't engineer that away.