My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.
Watch v1 was just awful. Those laptops with butterfly keyboards and the first gen Air were also completely broken in their own ways. If Apple manages to keep iterating on this device, they might eventually have a winner
My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise.
But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
As a counterpoint, I had a Series 2 for years and it worked really well. It was slow, so third party apps were not really usable, but the core functionality of the watch was perfectly fine. That is, until an unfortunate incident broke its screen while in the sea.
I had the watch they launched with, which Apple pretends didn't exist as they named the next model the Series 1 and this model never got a name. The watch improved considerably in the next generations, so you can do the math back from your Series 2 to get a sense of how truly bad it was.