It's important to mention here that Rust's approach to multithreading changes the rules of the game. Multithreading has rightfully earned its popular ire over the past few decades, but once you have a typesystem that prevents data races it's almost like there's an entirely new paradigm at your fingertips. So if Rust folk seem insistent on mentioning the use of threads, it's not because they want to push some agenda, it's because they want to overcome the suddenly-obsolete stigma against multithreading.

Note as well that Rust intends to have world-class support for a wide variety of approaches to concurrency and parallelism. Threading and channels are already in the stdlib, and fork/join and SIMD are in the works now. The goal is to enable the programmer to be able to choose the best tool for the job.