1) created for people less smart than the designers (even if not intentionally: maybe Gosling and Pike really do believe that generics and HOF are too difficult for the average programmer)
2) designed to be easy to use in a corporate environment with large teams of varying abilities (the 'simplicity', which is really more familiarity: most people can write boilerplate filled imperative C-family language style code already).
3) attempts to make certain types of errors harder than the languages it replaces (in Java thats memory errors, in Go it's concurrency errors), but by ignoring established PL research still gives you a big gun that is loaded and aimed at your foot (doing concurrency in Java with threads and locks, NULL and deadlocks in Go, etc). i.e. very conservative when it comes to adopting PL ideas, but perhaps bringing one old idea to the mainstream, and being prepared to make a lot of sacrifices (to ensure an 'easy' language) to get people on board with that one idea.
The amusing thing is that the creators of Go are some of the fiercest critics of Java, but they have created something that seems to follow a very similar philosophy to the original Java. I guess it remains to be seen if Go will have added as many features in 15 years time as Java has in the last 15.
I don't mean this as a slight against Go (or Java!). I just find the comparison illuminating.