The absolute curbstomping of the rest of the Unix workstation market by Mac OS X should put the lie to the notion that network-transparent display is in any wise essential. Beautiful, pixel-perfect, tear-free GUIs are much more important.
And anyway, even if you need remote display, network support isn't necessary in the core protocol. You can get networked display by having a Wayland compositor that runs on the remote end and communicates with a Wayland client on the local end in any number of better-than-X11 protocols: rdp, vnc, frickin' streaming h.264. And remote apps don't even have to know that they're being displayed remotely.
>> ...should put the lie to the notion that network-transparent display is in any wise essential. Beautiful, pixel-perfect, tear-free GUIs are much more important.
OSX comes pre-installed with an X server, which should put the lie to the notion that you can't have both. I don't know my way around this issue at an extremely low level, such as if I'd worked on the guts of an X server; however, I'm perfectly able to believe that video hardware has evolved capabilities that X11 just can't support properly. It also seems somewhat dubious that the subsystem that provides access to the video hardware needs to be coupled to a network protocol. It seems like, in principle, you could layer one atop the other and get the same -- or better -- result. Now, if GUI applications weren't forced to deal with X, then client support for X might start to erode as applications chose to go around it. But, how bad would that be? Is preventing it worth the opportunity cost?
OS X no longer comes preinstalled with an X server. Most Mac users are capable of getting along perfectly fine without it -- even developers. And anyway, X11 apps in Mac OS X are like weeaboos on the streets of Tokyo: no matter how earnestly they try to assimilate, they stand out like sore, awkward thumbs and obviously don't belong there.
If you want to develop beautiful apps on the Mac platform you use Cocoa -- not X. Apple decided against basing its graphics stack on X11 for sound technical reasons.
>> Apple decided against basing its graphics stack on X11 for sound technical reasons.
and even still, X runs on OSX just fine, AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong -- anyone). The X server could stand to have been a little more seamlessly-integrated into OSX from a usability standpoint, IME. But from a purely technical perspective it seemed to be fine.
And anyway, even if you need remote display, network support isn't necessary in the core protocol. You can get networked display by having a Wayland compositor that runs on the remote end and communicates with a Wayland client on the local end in any number of better-than-X11 protocols: rdp, vnc, frickin' streaming h.264. And remote apps don't even have to know that they're being displayed remotely.