Transparency does not work correctly with alignment?
Read chapter 23.4 of the beamer guide ("23.4 Uncovering Tagged Formulas Piecewise").
Notice: this is not an RTFM answer, this is easy to miss.
Edit: as egreg noticed, the above "answer" does not actually answer the question...
Now this is ugly, but works:
\documentclass{beamer}
\setbeamercovered{transparent}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\begin{gather*}
\uncover<1->{a = b \wedge b = c \\}
\uncover<2->{\mathrlap{\Rightarrow a = c}\hphantom{a = b \wedge b = c}\\}
\end{gather*}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
(It does at the expense of manually specifying the longest line, and doing it twice. A hackery, non-LaTeX-style, ugly "solution", but hey, the pdf looks good.)
Also, one could imagine semi-automating it to something like this:
\documentclass{beamer}
\setbeamercovered{transparent}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\newlength{\longestalignlinelength}
\newsavebox{\longestlinebox}
\newcommand{\longest}[1]{\sbox{\longestlinebox}{$\displaystyle #1$}\longestalignlinelength=\wd\longestlinebox}
\newcommand{\putline}[1]{\mathrlap{#1}\hspace{\longestalignlinelength}}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\longest{a = b \wedge b = c}
\begin{gather*}
\uncover<1->{\putline{a = b \wedge b = c}\\}
\uncover<2->{\putline{\Rightarrow a = c}\\}
\end{gather*}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
Still not very elegant, but a bit better.