It's pretty cool, there are a lot of industries that are starting to do this. Here's a good example on aircraft de-icing using virtual reality. The real thing is expensive and there are so many variants of aircraft, when you can pop on a headset and practice on the exact airframe that you're about to see in real life.
Another great example is football. You can only run so many practices in real life before the injury risk (or just plain fatigue) takes a toll, when you practice 10x as much with a headset and zero risk of injury. At some point you've got to do the real thing, but if you've seen it a hundred times already, you're that much more likely to succeed in reality.