I can speculate a bit with things that sound plausible to me given my knowledge of the system - but I might still be a bit off target... Still, maybe it helps a little.
Mir and Wayland both expect their clients to just render into a buffer, which clients might do with direct rendering, in which case the graphics hardware isn't really hidden from the client anyhow. AFAIK it's pretty normal practice that there's effectively in-application code (in the form of libraries that are linked to) that understands how to talk directly to the specific hardware (I think this already happens under Xorg). The protocol you talk to Wayland (and Mir, AFAIK) isn't really an abstraction over the hardware, just a way of providing buffers to be rendered (which might, have just been filled by the hardware using direct rendering).
In this case Xorg is a client of Mir, so it's a provider of buffers which it must render. The X11 client application might use direct rendering to draw its window, anyhow. But the Xserver might also want to access hardware operations directly to accelerate something it's drawing (I suppose)... So the X server needs some hardware-specific DDX, since Mir alone doesn't provide a mechanism to do all the things it wants.
As for why the Intel driver then needs to be modified... I also understand that Mir has all graphics buffers be allocated by the graphics server (i.e. Mir) itself. Presumably Xorg would normally do this allocation (?) In which case, the Intel DDX would need modifying to do the right thing under Mir. The only other reason for modifying the DDX that springs to mind is that perhaps the responsibilities of a "Mir Client" divide between Xorg and *its* client, so this could be necessary to incorporate support for the "Mir protocol" properly. That's just hand-waving on my part, though...
Bonus feature - whilst trying to find out stuff, I found a scary diagram of the Linux graphics stack but my brain is not up to parsing it at this time of day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Graphics_Stack_2013.svg