Don't forget about the tooling: unit testing, benchmarking, generated documentation, code formatting, and emacs+vim plugins are included in the official package. I think these are often overlooked when describing its benefits. You can jump in and start working right away.

In discussions about error handling in Go, I rarely see mention of panic used for private exception handling. If a module exposes a small surface area, the public entry points can recover from panics and return them as errors. Private functions can then use panic to report errors:

  func PublicEntryPoint(input string) (output []byte, err error) {
    defer func() {
      if e := recover(); e != nil {
        output = nil
        err = e
      }
    }()
    err = nil
    output = privateFunc(input) // no need to check for error here
    return
  }
  func privateFunc(input string) []byte {
    foo := otherPrivateFunc(...) // no need to check for error here
    // ...
  }
  func otherPrivateFunc() int {
    // ...
    panic(fmt.Errorf("Something is wrong"))
  }

I would panic-recover a specific type of error instead of the generic "error" type, but I'm simplifying for the example. Also, it is not recommended to panic across module boundaries.