It's a winning combo because you can recycle old and simple ideas for a whole new context.
[edit] felt bad because rereading this it implies the author has bad intentions. Don't mean that. Just mean it's cute to watch the golang community learn Java.
I do enjoy that Go gives a bit more obvious control over memory layout than Java did, and I enjoy using it as a small projects language. I've never used it in full anger/production, so I haven't seen the worst of it.
One funny thing about Guice(mentioned elsewhere): I've heard more than one Googler say that dislike the framework quite a bit, due to how heavily it can be abused.
One bit of advice that seems to have gone either missing in Java/JVM, or common knowledge, is the idea that only main/binary packages should have config options via flags/env vars. Many, many JVM libraries do not follow that convention, and I've had to hunt down a log4j XML file for Spark in order to turn down the logging levels before. Would much rather have that be controlled via a flag.
At Google pretty much all server configuration is done with flags. Binaries can and do have thousands of flags. And I view that as a much better solution than a config file that is searched for.
The idea is that modular units like processes and functions don't "search for configuration", they just accept parameters, and led the higher level application configure them. Then the code becomes very straightforward to read and debug.