For me, the killer feature of Go is that it produces executables that are quick to start up and run with a small memory footprint. It is great for utilities or agents or small daemons; where startup time or memory size are critical. It can also run without a JRE or other dependencies, which is nice if you are distributing software to end-users.

So I'm not sure I agree on your first two points. For me, lack of exceptions and generics means Go code is at least as verbose as Java, if not more so. Multi-threadedness is a wash for me; channels vs fork-join and executors are just not that different.

I think Java can produce native code today, but it isn't worth it for most scenarios where you would actually use Java. I think we'll see that change if Oracle ships an AOT compiler in "official Java".