For me the most annoying side-effect of this is that there's no way to signify an error in the server response, or even have errors rendered sensibly. Many servers just send errors in gophermap form (type 1), which can wind up being rendered as plain text or interpreted as binary data by the client, depending on the URL.

The one advantage to this approach is that you can always convince a client to show you the source of gopher://host/1index by requesting gopher://host/0index.