Just saw this NavetG8r, I would have responded way earlier. I have both the Rift and Vive since their pre-order, I'm honestly ready for the next generation. What was your old hardware setup? You probably didn't need to upgrade anything but your graphics card....CPU's and RAM haven't really advanced that much as far as gaming is concerned over several generations. Its all about the GPU.
My setup is an old ASUS Maximus V Formula motherboard with an i7 3770K CPU and 16GB of DDR3 1600mHz RAM. Pretty long in the tooth, but it runs everything VR you can throw at it because I upgraded to a 980Ti GPU. There is nothing VR that it can't handle and you don't even have to run it at lower settings, Ultra settings on everything. The only thing that would benefit greatly from a better CPU would be flight simulators, but the offerings out there suck so bad I'm not worried about that.
And yes, Google Earth is awesome....I imagine in 10 years time it will be unreal.
For the next generation I am going to start from scratch. This generation didn't require it.