This may be incorrect; I have only vague familiarity with the subject. I don't know if there are any non VNC-like solutions being worked on.
Wayland doesn't have network transparency as a first-class citizen, but it's easy to fit it into the mix. A bit of background:
In X11, the client sends the actual drawing commands (draw a line here, a smooth gradient here, a pixmap here, a curved line here, etc.) over a network pipe. The X server on the other end takes those commands and builds the resulting image.
In Wayland, your program just transfers (well, using shared memory) complete images of the entire window to the Wayland server.
The X11 solution is absolutely excellent and very efficient assuming your programs primarily use the X11 primitives. Most modern programs and toolkits do not use the drawing primitives; they just build the images they want and send a bunch of pixmaps to the X server. They do this primarily because X11 doesn't have a number of useful drawing primitives, like anti-aliased text. The result is that you're doing more or less what Wayland intends to do. (Though sending things like Xclock or Xeyes will be less efficient under Wayland, seeing as they use the X11 drawing primitives.)
In the end, Wayland will probably have something very much like per-window VNC. Your program will produce an image, some stub Wayland server will send that image over the network, and a Wayland compositor on the other end will receive it and display it.
Wayland doesn't have network transparency as a first-class citizen, but it's easy to fit it into the mix. A bit of background:
In X11, the client sends the actual drawing commands (draw a line here, a smooth gradient here, a pixmap here, a curved line here, etc.) over a network pipe. The X server on the other end takes those commands and builds the resulting image.
In Wayland, your program just transfers (well, using shared memory) complete images of the entire window to the Wayland server.
The X11 solution is absolutely excellent and very efficient assuming your programs primarily use the X11 primitives. Most modern programs and toolkits do not use the drawing primitives; they just build the images they want and send a bunch of pixmaps to the X server. They do this primarily because X11 doesn't have a number of useful drawing primitives, like anti-aliased text. The result is that you're doing more or less what Wayland intends to do. (Though sending things like Xclock or Xeyes will be less efficient under Wayland, seeing as they use the X11 drawing primitives.)
In the end, Wayland will probably have something very much like per-window VNC. Your program will produce an image, some stub Wayland server will send that image over the network, and a Wayland compositor on the other end will receive it and display it.