The Netchan project I think showed how that particular limitation -- distributed goroutines -- will be overcome in time and, i think, built in to the language runtime.

This is just idle speculation but it seemed to me, reading the mailing list ages ago when this was discussed, that netchan worked in many use cases, but not others, and it just was not the right time in the development of the language to be distracted by a tertiary feature like that. Now, I could be mis-reading the whole thing and maybe it will never be a language feature. But if I were a betting man...