Interesting idea, but...

The format might be stabilized when it's reasonable stable, there is no version number, or any specific plan to tell now. We will get there over time. Until that, nothing should expect to be able to read/write the raw files directly. They need to get dumped with journalctl, or read with the library API, that's all what we can promise now.

The classic syslog model is not touched at all. If anything relies on any of the syslog features, the format, the remote logging, the files, it should run syslog like it always did.

This is something that runs on the local machine, and serves as the base for tools that need to make decisions or provide the 'history' of services. If syslog is the model to look at, journald is just a proxy.

The journald design is network-aware, but in no way network-transparent. All that can be done pretty efficiently by additional tools, but these tools will probably not be part of the core installation.