... but, garbage collection, no direct memory management = impossible to write any firmware etc that needed to directly set bitflags and such. how could you call Go "low-level systems programming"?

Relative to Ruby, an interpreted dynamic language, sure, I will grant you that Go is lower-level, in the sense that you can compile a binary executable from it.

Go also happens to have web server primitives in their standard library and you COULD build a web app with only net/http...