I think that's a little bit unfair, since Go introduces many powerful ideas not (traditionally) available in Java or C++: namely first class concurrency and functional primitives. Its handling of typing, the ability to define types not necessarily based on structs, the excellent design of interfaces are other examples. Go is an extremely powerful and expressive language that opens up the doors for programming in new paradigms, while making it easy to maintain readability and simplicity.

Fair point with the nil issue, I think that's one of Go's other weaknesses. But it does make up for that with its excellent error handling paradigm.