Wow, I feel so bad for our Rift brothers.
I kind of do as well, I know many great people there who are probably devastated at this point. Then again, you gotta look at the amount of self-deception they have been buying into the last months and just shake your head in disbelief.
Note: I'm going to sound like a Rift-bashing Vive fanboy in this rant. But no - I really hope Rift will be released as soon as possible and will be a great, competing product that will help raise the quality of the Vive. But right now I am mostly pissed off at all the misconceptions going on:
* One part is the delivery situation. Oculus have been so vague from the early preorder times. That is why I made this post in January, because the wording of the preorder was obviously set up for this kind of postponation.
* The Tested review (and quite a few other reviews) was in my opinion a highlight in cognitive dissonance. Reviewers did everything they could to make a comparison angled around the Rift's few advantages, while pretending, and at several points saying, that Touch would soon be out and would "probably" be just as good as Vive's tracking.
Rift fans gobbled it all up which really makes me sad for them. The facts remain as they have been the last months:
* Oculus has some sort of problem with management and seem very inefficient at getting things done, all the way since day 1.
* HTC has a proven high production capacity.
* Vive is a gamechanging product, and the use of lasers for millimeter precision and low latency has been well worth the investment, because this precision and responsiveness is one of the first things reviewers comment on. An infrared camera can never be the same as motored lasers.
* HTC's optics are not worse, and numerous people have actually reported them as significantly better - higher potential FOV and less annoying artifacts. The Tested review did it's very best to just pretend these observations didn't happen, and skew the impression into a "balanced" point of view slightly favoring the Rift.
* Touch is a theoretical product at this point. It is being held back either because of low product quality or because of lacking production capacity. It's release date is vague. Rift was supposed to be released in march 2016. It will now hit most people around may / june. When do you think Touch will be released? 2017 seems likely to me.