"Why isn't Apple approaching their device in the same way this other company approached their device? A device which, incidentally, nobody really cares about anymore after some initial."

Apple doesn't want their market to be the same as the market for the HTC Vive, which isn't exactly a successful product (at least by Apple standards). They also don't want the market to be defined by their competitors, so they're approaching the market in a very different way. An example of this is how, in the keynote where they announced their new VR headset, they didn't say the words "Virtual Reality" once.