I don't have a lot of experience in Go either (I'm writing my bot for the AI challenge in Go), but so far I've been very happy with it. What did you feel was odd?
* Everything is a file (/proc, /net) * UTF-8 * WMII
I suppose that's enough for a research OS and its creators to be successful.
Before they worked on Plan 9 they created Unix, that the *nix world lost its way from its simple, small and beautiful roots is clearly something that still pains them greatly.
I would not say that they lost touch with the rest of the world, but that the rest of the world lost touch with them, which has been a great loss.
Things like variable declarations matching the look of how variables are used ('inside out' parsing) are not simple and are responsible for the certain something that makes C work. And Unix was never beautiful, it was always a huge hack.
* The "exception handling" (or lack thereof). Defer, panic, and recover do provide an interesting means to achieve some similar behavior, but I ended up testing return values _a lot_, and all over the place. It felt very boilerplate and messy. Also, I found it odd that they claimed that the 'try-catch-finally idiom' was convoluted, then came up with defer, panic, and recover. Which calls code on function exit. I liked defer (great way to clean up allocations in reverse on the way out), but I did not find panic-recover as a convenient replacement for exception handling (nor does that seem to be the proper use-case for it anyway).
* new vs make. I don't see why they didn't just unify these in some way. Purity over pragmatism, perhaps.
* goto
* static compilation only (no shared libraries). I know static libraries are safer and sure do make deployment dreamy, but it would be nice to benefit from shared libraries if desired (easier to deploy security fixes, memory savings, etc).