It's like what you'd do with actors on top of some kind of userspace scheduling (e.g. a thread pool that accepts tasks), yes. Writes to channels are implicitly yield points, so you write cooperative multitasking code (again, like you'd do in any language with userspace scheduling) with all the advantages that entails (no blocking), but without having to explicitly manage your sequencing/yielding. Since the whole language is built around the idea that this is going to be happening, a lot of the immediate problems with userspace scheduling go away: anything that's trying to do thread-local storage (e.g. web requests or database sessions getting bound to the current thread) will necessarily be goroutine-aware and do the right thing.

There's no free lunch, of course: it becomes much harder to write code that is pinned to a single system thread (e.g. good luck interoperating with a C library that expects you to pass callbacks), or to use higher-performance blocking I/O in the cases where that's warranted. But it makes the 80% case very straightforward.