I agree with all of the above and I write Java code for a living currently (Android/Dalvik though, not for the JVM).

Another cool aspect of the last point (Go being small and lightweight) is that if you've got gcc and mercurial on a supported platform, building latest go from source is as easy as:

hg clone http://code.google.com/p.go cd go/src ./make.bash

Got to build a local copy of the JVM and/or JDK for some reason? Good luck with that (even ignoring all the licensing, OpenJDK vs closed, etc)