A comparative study of the nucleation of In enriched islands in In0.2Ga0.8As/GaAs multilayers grown on top of GaAs or AlAs buffers deposited on GaAs substrates with various miscut parameters was performed by using X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques. Experimental results showed that the evolution of the self-assembly strongly depends on the miscut parameters and the morphology of the buffer/multilayer interface. For the samples with the same nominal strain misfit between the bilayers the nucleation is enhanced for the larger initial miscut on the substrate and the degree of the lateral ordering across the interface is promoted by the morphology of the underlying AlAs buffer layer.