Yeah, you’re understanding things correctly. The virtual texture has to cover a large area, so even with max quality it might struggle to match traditional shading.
Performance is usually a win because all of your expensive landscape shading is essentially cached.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a shader that runs the full landscape material near the camera, and then dynamically branches to only sample the RVT at a short distance away when the quality loss is less noticable.
I suspect that might be a nice compromise.