This was my big hold up of using Linux as a whole. The screentearing is horrible, and coming from OSX where everything is as smooth as butter, it is an issue. But thankfully, Mint (which I'm on atm) allows the user to turn off vsync, and because I have an nvidia graphics card, I can turn on full-composition, and have my graphics card do vsync, and BAM! smooth as butter. It's an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience.
I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side, but with hardware becoming more powerful and better supported, I don't think the future is Wayland, but instead defaulting to a higher level of gpu acceleration than the default Gnome settings we have today. This removes the latency, the page tearing, and responsiveness issues that X11 has Wayland was created to fix.