A non commercial University research group and commercial Corporation research group can be focused on solving very different problems.
I think Pike and the other designers skew more towards corporate research (Bell Labs). And surely the development of GO as well as other Google research projects are intended to win in the market place.
It's probably useful to look at the goals that the designers of go had when they designed the language. All other discussions seem irrelevant about what go has or doesn't have if it wasn't one of the goals. Pike, et al, weren't interested in solving metaphorically "your" programming language problems. They wanted to solve problems they observed at Google and just happened to open source the resulting language.
From https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
> The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google
I think Pike and the other designers skew more towards corporate research (Bell Labs). And surely the development of GO as well as other Google research projects are intended to win in the market place.