I think this is notable because Intel as a company is taking this stand against Canonical. Canonical in the long run is going to need support from the other two major graphics hardware vendors to make this work well. Having Intel already come out against it isn't a good start.
Perhaps Canonical shouldn't have used FUD against Wayland (which is heavily contributed to by Intel).
Just to play devil's advocate, did they spread FUD, or just say it didn't suit their purposes?
The consensus from many high-profile non-Ubuntu developers was that their criticisms of Wayland reflected worse on Ubuntu than Wayland. They did say vaguely that Wayland didn't suit their purposes, but none of the specifics they provided turned out to be valid, and some of their criticism included alluding to potential security issues in Wayland that never existed.
Their initial comments for why Wayland didn't suit their purposes were misguided and incorrect, and Wayland supported all of the features they said it wouldn't.
Ignorance isn't really FUD, but both their incorrect comments and their want to do their own thing hurt Wayland a lot.
Well that's kind of the point. Much like KDE's developers have typically refused to become maintainers of Mir-specific code while Mir is still specific only to Canonical, Intel are now telling Canonical they can maintain their own damn patchset.
Because thats what Ubuntu needs, more fragmentation, and a little less contribution
Don't they contribute little to begin with anyway? I remember there was a bit of mudslinging last year and the hot topic was that Microsoft contributed more code to Linux than Canonical did. While I think they've done great things for the overall landscape - I don't particularly like the direction they've been going since Unity. I'm not saying that it's the wrong thing for everyone everywhere. What I don't like, in particular, is that it feels like they're closing off something that wasn't meant to be. Unfortunate as it is, I hope they continue to remain viable - as they are a stepping stone off of the Microsoft and Apple platforms.
The moment Ubuntu becomes unviable either because of their own doing or because other people in the linux community want to throw a fit and have a pissing contest is the moment I switch to Mac OS.
It's not that great.
There are plenty of other distros that are just as good.
And there is the problem, I don't want to try out a 100 different distros.
You have limited yourself to the arbitrary limit of 99 distros before giving up. I'm sure you'll find a good one among the top 99 on distrowatch.com.