Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour.
Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume:
- It's faster than Firefox.
- It's safer than every other browser out there.
How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user:
- It's different.
- Firefox feels plenty safe.
This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need features to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch.
Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit.
The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.
This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland.
The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default).
For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.