Yes, I remember there was a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Go first turned up. My personal favourite was the bloke who compared Go to "Brand X" and found that the latter (which is older than C) was the better language, in his opinion [1].
I mean it's not as though using type system technology invented in the 1980s would have been such a stretch for a language created twenty-something years later.
The thing is, though, that Go has gotten lots of para-language stuff right. It ships with gofmt and inbuilt tools for manipulating code, it has decent concurrency out of the box, it compiles and runs fairly quickly. It's really meant to be a better C from a universe where C++ was never invented (I've seen it compared to Limbo, a language developed on Plan9 -- given the heritage, that would make sense).