First, remember that Palmer said a while back that the true price of VR headsets was around $1000 or even north of that, and that VR is only getting off the ground thanks to very steep hardware discounts thanks to the deep pockets of companies like Facebook. This is also why I'm slightly worried about HTC's Vive, which I favor over Oculus, because HTC is bleeding like crazy.
Second, don't forget that we are at the tail end of the modern desktop display technology, we're getting 4K OLED displays and 8K is coming up. These will be superior to an unproven, immature and overpriced technology like VR is as of today, thus it is easy to be reactionary and say "oh it will flop". But understand that VR 5 years hence will be a much different beast, especially as the new consoles will almost certainly have native support for it and have GPUs on the scale of a Volta or even higher.
That's the moment when mass market adoption will truly kick off. I expect Google Cardboard and similar initiatives to be marginal until that moment.
I'll get my 4K OLED without any hesitation 2-3 years down the line, but I fully expect it will be my last monitor because the future is VR. The immersion is simply on a whole different dimension. If VR can compete and even beat current mature tech for immersion/amazement, then imagine how brutal it will be 4-5 years down the line.
I won't be buying these early kits, but that's mostly because there is very little content. Rubin, the guy heading up Oculus' software/developer relations has admitted the same thing, saying we're still 2-3 years out before the true VR-centric content comes out in sufficient volume to truly make a difference.
By that time, price should have come down a lot, too.