In my own personal opinion, the fact that Google have brought to the forefront the need for a new systems language is way more important than the exact feature

In my own personal opinion, the fact that Google have brought to the forefront the need for a new systems language is way more important than the exact feature set they have chosen to include. Even things like garbage collection and array bounds checking make life better. One thing I find interesting is that I've seen several people claim that Go is all but useless until they implement generics. Java has only had generics for the last 5 years, C# had them after that, and the languages Go is intended to compete with still don't have them (well C++ has templates and I guess C has void *)!