Yes, the docs are awful at the moment. It's mostly a question of making sure things are stable before we commit to writing a lot of docs; we absolutely need better ones. The standard library tends to use the bleeding-edge features more than user Rust code (as it contains implementations of core traits and whatnot), so its churn is high. Despite what others have suggested, I don't think it needs a total rewrite, but various names should change.

A "go"-like binary is on the roadmap; it's mostly a question of refactoring. We have a pretty printer, a doc generator, a package manager, and a compiler (all in various stages of completeness); the trick is to just bundle them into one nice package.

A trail of notes would definitely be helpful, to see what the initial hurdles are for beginners.

From what I've seen the biggest problem is that 0.3's syntax is totally different from the unreleased 0.4 (due to be released next week). Most people, understandably, build from the packaged 0.3 and none of the examples in the documentation work. 0.4 contains the syntax we're committing to; most of the changes from then on should be backwards-compatible with it (unless you use the deprecated stuff, which we're adding warnings for).