X as a protocol is long gone. Direct memory access, kernel drivers etc are not really compatible with network protocol. Wayland is just streamlining and formalizing current situation.
At my old job (which I left about ten days ago) I ran X servers and clients on different machines daily. Typical example was running my IDE on my desktop, connected to an X server running on my laptop.
The X developers didn't break remoting, but that doesn't mean contemporary gui toolkits still use the features of X that made X "network transparent." As I understand it, most features of the protocol are largely ignored except for the parts needed to pump bitmaps over a network.
The main reason, as best i can tell, is that every DE out employ OpenGL compositing that effectively bypass X.
Meaning that to draw the desktop they effectively pain a single large window inside X that is then filled with the output of the GPU.
Thing is that Wayland seems more comparable to svgalib than X. This in that Wayland pretty much a lib/protocol for talking to the graphics hardware. Something else, be it their reference implementation Weston, GTK, Qt, or some other alternative, has to handle the handling of windows, desktops etc.
Right now you can use Wayland as a driver for Xorg.
Nonsense - I use it all the time, as do many other people I know. It is mostly GTK+ and Qt that badly misuse the protocol by rending everything client side. (OpenGL is it's own world, and works with X just fine, even remotely)
GTK+ and Qt are the two toolkits that people develop against because no one wants to use X directly, nor abominations like Xt and Motif.
If all the developer thrust is behind toolkits that "badly misuse the protocol", maybe the protocol is a really shitty fit for app development?
Welcome to why Wayland is the future and X is deprecated. Daniel Stone's talk should be required viewing before anyone speaks on the X vs. Wayland issue:
