Indeed. For those workloads, you need both a hefty CPU and GPU. I'd even argue that the 4c8t high-end mobile Intel chips of today are a little weak for workloads like that. A $250 desktop Ryzen 5 1600X would crush them in most productivity workloads. I'm tempted to say you should wait for mobile Ryzen/Raven Ridge after the summer, but that's quite a while away. For laptops today, get the highest-end Intel 4-core/8-thread i7 you can get your hands on, and stay away from thin laptops - you need sufficient cooling to avoid throttling. Read reviews.
As for a GPU, for a laptop the minimum would be the GTX 1060 (/Quadro P3000), but that's on the low end too. A GTX 1070 or Quadro P4000 would definitely be recommended for any VR development. After all, any in-development project is bound to perform worse than a finished, optimized piece of software - so you'll need to overbuild to avoid nausea and performance drops. Note that for Quadro cards, Nvidia only marks the P4000 and P5000 as "VR-ready". For a desktop build this is far easier - desktop cards have far superior cooling, and thus clock higher and throttle less. Also, you have reasonably priced AMD alternatives at some performance levels. A good RX 480 or GTX 1060 could do the job, although moving up to the 1070 level would again be a plus. Note that moving to professional-level cards will seriously increase prices significantly (the Quadro P4000 is $900 at Newegg, while GTX 1070s can be found for around $340), but gives you driver validation for a lot of content creation applications and a few features not found on consumer-level cards.
The only Dell (didn't check any other manufacturers) laptops I could find with the new cards are the 17" Precision 7720 series. To get a suitable CPU, enough RAM, a display suited for content creation, a decent SSD plus a HDD for storage and a Quadro P4000, budget around $4000. That's with a Xeon CPU and ECC RAM, but the savings from moving to non-ECC and an i7 in that price range are negligible.