I have a hard time being impressed by the win. What's the major difference for writing a go AI versus checkers? Doesn't it really come down to the amount of "if/else" that can be processed in time? To me this is a bigger feat for enclosed, non-networked processing than for AI.

Some things are not as simple as playing out every possible solution and picking the optimal one. Art and humor, for example. It takes intelligence to operate and judge subjectively, not compute power.