Enabling the Internet of Things, machine-type communications (MTC) is a next big thing in wireless innovation. In this work, we concentrate on the attractive benefits offered by the emerging IEEE 802.11ah technology to support a large number of MTC devices with extended communication ranges. We begin with a comprehensive overview of the novel features introduced by the latest IEEE 802.11ah specifications followed by the development of a powerful mathematical framework capturing the essential properties of a massive MTC deployment with unsaturated traffic patterns. Further, we compare our analytical findings for a characteristic MTC scenario against respective system-level simulations across a number of important performance indicators. Our analytical results provide adequate performance predictions even when simulations are challenged by the excessive computational complexity. In addition, we study the novel IEEE 802.11ah mechanisms offering improved support for massive device populations and conclude on their expected performance.