Right now: Meta Quest 3

If you wait a few months: Steam Frame

Quest 3 is standalone, and runs VR games on the headset, or with Steam Link and good wifi, you can play VR games from your PC on it. Caveat, you need a Meta (Facebook) account to use it.

Quest 3, not the 3S, uses pancake lenses, which is the big advantage compared to older headsets in comfort and clarity.

Steam Frame is going to be the better, will also play Standalone, but is designed to connect to a PC, including its own wireless link that doesn’t need to use your wifi router. Requires a Steam account. Caveat, you need to wait a few months for it to be released.

Steam Frame has a better-specced design that is intended for its purpose of VR gaming headset, and Valve doesn’t track you like Meta does.

Tbh- I find this timing real unfortunate. Steam Frame is coming out in a few months and I find it’s open source software compelling as well as the hardware in general - I am also wary of the Zuck. That said, it’s not ready yet so that info doesn’t really help you.

1. Ecosystems, for now, the meta quest 3 is one of the most popular headsets on the market. So it is fairly well supported, even if meta just laid off a bunch of their VR people.
2. Price to performance for what I understand the Zuck is wallet tanking the market so it has great price to performance but will fall significantly short of the performance on the much higher end.
3. I can’t answer this I haven’t looked into phone VR enough
4. The meta quest is capable of being standalone, but if you were to drive it from a PC instead the GPU power would vary by title. Gorilla tag wouldn’t take much, but cyberpunk would be a bit difficult.

I am answering as someone who has recently become interested in VR so anyone else can feel free to correct me or educate me as well.

Good luck finding the right device for your kid.

Personally you need to decided what features are important to you. From my understanding anything connected to Meta requires logging into Facebook to use. For me that is a big no not to mention that I’m a linux user.

https://vr-compare.com/ is a decent place to start looking around and get an idea on what you need to look for.

I’ve seen a few things that are interesting but so far nothing has ticked all the boxes to make the purchase happen.

Depends on how old are your kids. If they are young you could get a second hand quest 2, for ~$120.
It should be good enough to see if they are actually going to use it on long term.
With that you could hold out for the steam frame also. Without investing too much. And probably you can resale the quest 2 getting most of your money back.

How are the ecosystems? Does the choice of brand lock you in or out of particular titles? I suspect his main goal is to play gorilla tag and similar.

The Quest has its own ecosystem of native VR games that run directly on the device. You need to create a Meta account to use the headset. However, it’s possible to sideload apps to it and you can stream PCVR games to the Quest.

Is Metaquest 3 an objectively good/decent product? What are some viable alternatives?

As of right now, the Quest 3 is a decent-choice hardware-wise, probably the best in terms of pure value and it has the largest userbase. The big downside is that it’s made by Meta. It’s also a bit of an unfortunate time to buy a VR-headset, as it looks like the upcoming Steam Frame will be a better choice, once it releases. If your kids birthday is still a few months away, it might be worth waiting for a bit before buying anything. It’s completely unknown when the Steam Frame will release though.

Something like a Pico Neo 3 could potentially be an alternative if you want to avoid Meta. For purely PCVR, there is also the Valve Index, but that’s more of an enthusiast-level device that requires a more complex setup using base stations for tracking.

He’s got a decent phone and a half-decent PC. Will the same headset work for both?

The PC should work. It doesn’t stream phone games.

How much HPU (if any) is required to drive one of these decently?

GPU I assume? Well, for one thing, it can run games standalone, though those games won’t have impressive graphics. For PCVR streaming, I’d recommend at least something like a 1070, preferrably something much better.

I bought a Quest 2 before Meta took over the company, and have recently started using it again after letting it collect dust for a while.

I totally understand not wanting to sign up for a Zuckerberg product, but the Quest is probably one of the easiest VR setups. Just log in and go. No wires connecting you to a computer or worrying about whether or not your setup can handle the games you’re trying to run.

I’ve heard the Quest 3 is much better than the 2, but I have no experience with the 3.

Again, Meta deserves whatever hate they get, but I have to admit the Quest environment is nice and easy to work with.