Your points are really good for home theatre playback,. However consider that in HT scenarios, you basically have your media and pixel array aligned in most cas

Your points are really good for home theatre playback,. However consider that in HT scenarios, you basically have your media and pixel array aligned in most cases. You essentially have a fairly straightforward interpolation before it goes to an analog space for viewing. In VR you have two. You have the plane the video is played on and then the display. That disparity can cause issues like aliasing or generally weird bluriness. You can see this even in relatively lower resolutin headsets like the Quest 2/3/Pro where even 1080p video often looks bad even though it’s occupying less than an actual 720p section of the display. And yes you’re right you could employ an upscaler. But the name of the game in VR is latency and power draw. NVIDIA has done great work in this field but they have a lot more latitude due to form factor. To the best of my knowledge, Apple tend to prefer straight decode and playback without AI upscalers on their devices.