It always seemed to be a leap forward in practicality to me.
I need to read a queue, process something, and send a message of the results somewhere else. To do that I need a package for that specific queue, maybe something I'm sending to unless it is plain json, and the standard library. Installation is scp and a HUP.
Where I'm using it, I don't need language theory, I just need to get my work done so I can move on to something interesting.
I don't think anyone is selling Go as a huge leap forwards in computer science. It is a huge leap forwards in software engineering though.