Not to devalue their engineering departments, but I really don't remember any innovations in the software space from ASUS, Lenovo or alike hardware vendors. To me they're all essentially the same stuff, with different kind of junkware (or, in case of Lenovo, malware) bundled.

What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.

I kinda agree. I don't think any of them are likely to be major players in the space, but I think they might be able to build niche products that serve specific markets better than Meta's generalist VR headset. They might try a lightweight, battery free, sitting headset for gamers or media applications, for example.

And I think just generally they're more likely to try random things than Meta are to get hype around some unique feature. Take the Asus Zenbook Duo as an example, it's not necessarily a great product but it's interesting and some people will buy it for that. Plus industry learns something from experiments like this.

Either way, it's a good move for Meta and it's good for the industry that there is a fully-featured OS available for hardware manufacturers.