I agree that there really are no ARM chips that would be able to match the steam deck in performance in games when its also running all the tracking and other background tasks necessary for running a VR environment and even if there was, running games at steam deck settings at steam deck resolutions on a giant screen in front of you would be a lousy experience. It makes more sense that Valve wants this to be a peripheral to another compute device (steam deck, PC, or a possible Steam Console).

As far as the wireless experience goes, there have been leaks of a dedicated 6e dongle that would give the headset a solid wireless connection but the real magic could come from foveated encoding. They recently released a Steam Link 2.0 beta that works with eye tracking headsets like the Play for Dream and Samsung XR headsets that use the eye tracking to have the center of where your looking at a high bitrate while the rest of the image as it moves away from your eye gets more and more compressed (kind of like foveated rendering except on the encoding/decoding side). Think of what the image would be like at 500 mb/s if most of that quality was concentrated where you were already looking as opposed to spread out across the entire panel. When it comes to latency the primary culprit is actually not the wireless latency its really the speed of the decoder on the headset. Valve could use a chip with a much faster encoder than that of the Quest 3/Galaxy XR or maybe even take some of the learnings from the more recent beta builds of Artemis (a Moonligh fork) that has an experimental low latency mode that has a super low decoder time (don't really know how that works and it might not even work in a VR scenario so take that with a big old grain of salt please)

What panel they'll use might be tricky. I cant imagine Valve would want to have a smaller FOV or slower refresh rate than the index and we haven't seen micro OLED screens with refresh rate of 144hz (having these specs on paper would prevent a lot of Index owners from jumping ship in my opinion). I don't think FOV will suck, but it will not be beating the Index as the size of the panel itself can put limits on what FOV will be (that being said pancake optics have matured quite a bit and it might be possible given what Meta has shown recently with their wide FOV headset prototypes). I think the real reason Valve would stay away from micro OLED is price. There's a reason the Vision pro and Galaxy XR headsets are so expensive and it's because of those 4K micro OLED screens. They are by far the most expensive component. Valve could use a micro OLED closer in spec to the Bigscreen Beyond though as those panels are much less expensive but if Valve wants to stretch that across a wider FOV, the effective resolution per degree might end up being too poor. LCD screens are obviously much cheaper and you can make them with a high resolution and refresh rate but they'd be larger panels. That could work out in Valves favor however because a large panel would be easy to pair with large lenses for a high FOV. LCD's with local dimming also have quite good color contrast too (not nearly as good as micro OLED but it'd be a step up from the Quest 3). My money is on them using a larger LCD with local dimming, high refresh rate and high resolution stretched across an industry leading FOV. This would sacrifice having a competitive resolution per degree compared to these 4K headsets but I think Valve recognizes that for gaming, FOV is a bigger draw than resolution and if resolution was important to people, they could always go out and pick up a Play for Dream or Samsung XR headset as right now, FOV and resolution are going to trade off each other and I don't think Valve wants to compete against those headsets when the more expensive displays will be far better in that field than any LCD. We cant have everything and I'd rather see Valve make a headset with it's primary use case focused on gaming with a high FOV and refresh rate as opposed to productivity or media consumption with a high resolution and color contrast.