I used gob for my first client/server Go program, which was a "make one of something you know about to throw away" new language experiment. It worked, but I quickly turned away from it, because it would never be cross platform.

I saw gob more as an experiment that the Go team used to check the reflect package's usability. (Which sucks anyway, by the way.)

I'm surprised it's still in the stdlib. I would have guessed it would have been removed for Go 1.0, because it was already clear then that it was not suitable for anything more experiments.