I can understand that Wayland does not want to pay for the complexity of network transparency, but I'd be sorry to see it go entirely. I'm one of the few people who do make use if X11's network transparency on a regular basis. Being able to open a web browser on a machine that is several ssh hops away is awfully convenient. I hope that Wayland has some provisions for reproducing or emulating X11 even if it isn't built into the core.
This may be incorrect; I have only vague familiarity with the subject. I don't know if there are any non VNC-like solutions being worked on.
Wayland doesn't have network transparency as a first-class citizen, but it's easy to fit it into the mix. A bit of background:
In X11, the client sends the actual drawing commands (draw a line here, a smooth gradient here, a pixmap here, a curved line here, etc.) over a network pipe. The X server on the other end takes those commands and builds the resulting image.
In Wayland, your program just transfers (well, using shared memory) complete images of the entire window to the Wayland server.
The X11 solution is absolutely excellent and very efficient assuming your programs primarily use the X11 primitives. Most modern programs and toolkits do not use the drawing primitives; they just build the images they want and send a bunch of pixmaps to the X server. They do this primarily because X11 doesn't have a number of useful drawing primitives, like anti-aliased text. The result is that you're doing more or less what Wayland intends to do. (Though sending things like Xclock or Xeyes will be less efficient under Wayland, seeing as they use the X11 drawing primitives.)
In the end, Wayland will probably have something very much like per-window VNC. Your program will produce an image, some stub Wayland server will send that image over the network, and a Wayland compositor on the other end will receive it and display it.
I used to as well, but I discovered that VNC completely beats X forwarding in terms of responsiveness, reliability, speed, clipboard management and OpenGL usability. Modern apps simply draw so much so complex things that the recipe is heavier than the effect.
The philosophy is different, I admit, and it needs certain setup, but it is totally worth it.
Yes, I use that all the time too. There are certainly alternatives around for getting a remote window displayed locally but the simplicity of "ssh -X" is hard to beat.
That would be XWayland, essentialy running X on Wayland the way you'd run it on Windows or MacOS X now, which should go a long way towards easing the transition.
As much as X may suck, it's actually faster for me to start LibreOffice through ssh -X over Wifi on my Linux PC than running it on my MacBook. That's quite good for an obsolete technology.
