The announcement of Mir from Canonical upset some people. The same group of people also believe that Wayland, a project backed mostly by some guys in Intel, is only way to go.
I don't feel excited about Mir, at the same time, I don't think it is something bad.
It is worth noting that Canonical used to put their hope on Wayland [1]. Canonical didn't contribute much, if any, to Wayland, but contribution should not be an obligation.
How did other parties play with Wayland?
Let's see what did desktop environments do.
AFAIK, GNOME, a community project generally taken care by Red Hat employees, did almost nothing except accepting some code from Wayland developers. And they recently realized that the display stack need some love after the announcement of Mir [2].
KDE did something to an extent that a demo distribution can be created [3]. The days were good before Nokia switched to Windows Phone since there used to be an interest to put Wayland on MeeGo. Qt's support of Wayland may more or less related to Nokia's involvement at that time.
Enlightenment also did something with Wayland support. But note that E17 is release at late 2012, so it was not an option for normal users. Also note that Enlightenment has some Samsung sponsorship. As Samsung used EFL in Bada and plan to use EFL in Tizen, there may be an interest of Wayland from Samsung also.
Other DE/WM doesn't seem to bother with Wayland stuff.
It is clear from the above brief record that the pure community interest of Wayland is limited, even though proprietary OS has been working better for years. Corporate interest of Wayland generally comes from mobile platform, but a relevant Linux-based mobile platform other than Android hasn't appeared yet.
Put it in another way, heavy lifting is needed to make Wayland useful in real world applications. Before the announcement of Mir, it is not clear who will do the needed work in near future.
Should Canonical be the first party to massively use Wayland? Probably not.
Canonical has been focused on mobile platform recently. Before they can really be a threat to Android and iOS, they actually compete with Tizen, Firefox OS and Sailfish OS. But the other three Linux-based mobile platform all want to use Wayland actually. So Canonical may not want to help its competitors.
Some time is needed to see what Mir really is. But the good thing is that Mir is based by Canonical's motivation of dominance in desktop and mobile.
On the other hand, motivation is something not clear in the development timeline of Wayland. Pro-Wayland people is not affected by Mir technically. They just need enough motivation to push Wayland in timely manner.
- http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
- https://live.gnome.org/Wayland
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/
- http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=77
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