It's such a shame they insisted on their timing schedule for this release. It means the biggest Linux distro is committed to running X applications natively for the 6 years to come.

Imagine how good it would have been for the Linux community as a whole if they would have been able to exclude X from this release. We came so close to finally shaking up the Linux user interface stack.

I wonder if they've had a discussion about moving the LTS down half a year or perhaps a year, just for Mir.

edit: To help a bit with the imagination part, if we'd have Mir in this release, then a whole bunch of big UI products could say in ~3 years that about 80% of their users are running Mir enabled desktops. That could aid them to consider moving to a native Mir stack, the increase of work on this layer would not only benefit Mir but also Wayland as a side effect. An even more beneficial side effect would the assistance of big companies like NVidia and AMD and perhaps Valve be to this process, if things go according to plan their drivers on Linux could benefit a lot from more well defined/thought out interfaces, something which again could benefit Wayland also.