Unless they're planning this for 13.04 or later, it definitely sounds like a bad deal. Wayland just moved to a "real" project space outside of Kristian's personal repo, and it is nowhere near mature enough to support something like Ubuntu. Even if GTK and QT "mostly work", there's still a lot more in the X ecosystem that is hard to replace, namely proprietary drivers and the knowledgebase associated with working with X.

Even Ubuntu has a history of pushing out reliable, mature applications for much less mature ones on the basis of theoretical improvements. Look at Empathy and Pidgin; I still get crashes from Empathy all the time, the skinning and font-size support have problems, etc., whereas Pidgin just works great. Why couldn't they have just affixed the Telepathy backend as a major player in Pidgin, or at least forked and made Empathy a Pidgin derivative? It would have worked out much better.

I'm just hoping that Arch doesn't freak out and fear that Ubuntu is becoming more "bleeding edge" than Arch and remove X for Wayland in the next three weeks.