If you're IMC, you're looking at the panel anyway.
But what if flying IMC meant looking "outside" via head-mounted display--a HUD-like pitch/attitude display with airspeed, altitude, and heading; highway-in-the-sky guidance, synthetic terrain and runways, traffic, etc.--instead of looking at a couple of small gauges or displays and trying to build that picture up in your head? I think this is the real eventual promise for this kind of technology.
I mean, how often do we tell VFR pilots "look out the window, not at your instruments!"? One look out the window on a clear day is far,
far superior for attitude and terrain awareness. It's an intuitive picture of runway alignment, navigation (if suitable landmarks exist), and general flying in the pattern. We don't have to consciously build that picture in our heads because we just
see it.
But then as soon as we (in general) hit IMC, we start looking at little abstracted gauges fixed to the panel. For attitude, we basically look out a little soda straw of a window at a fake horizon. For navigation, we look at a compass and use a couple of pointers that tell us how far off from our selected navigation source we are and use that to figure out where on a fixed map that corresponds to (unless we have a GPS map); for approaches, we keep a couple needles centered and try to hit certain numbers shown on a chart, since we can't just look out the window and simply see where we are. How is that "better"?
That's the promise of this technology--the potential to give pilots better information in a more intuitive format. It might just be a fancy toy still in its infancy right now, but eventually--and it will happen one day, even if the FAA and many pilots have to be dragged kicking and screaming, and even if it takes thirty years--it will be reliable enough, and affordable enough, to replace our current panel-mounted avionics.