Erlang's error checking model is a great deal more like Go's than he thinks. Erlang is in the "exceptions are exceptional" camp too, and idiomatic code should not be throwing exceptions around willy-nilly.

Go is noticably more fragile with errors. Unhandled exceptions (which are just a fact of life unless you're a perfect programmer) will result in the entire program terminating if you don't have something that handles it. This behavior is forced on it precisely because of the shared memory model (one of the actual big differences); if one goroutine has f'ed up, you simply don't know what the state of your program is anymore. (Theoretically you could do better than that, but not simply.) Since Erlang memory is isolated, it can kill just that one process, and the other processes can pick up the pieces. (Not necessarily perfectly or without loss, but in practice, really quite well.) Consequently, for any serious Go program, you're still going to have to choose an exception handling policy, it's not as if it has gotten away from exceptions. Failures are a fact of life... for all you know, memory was corrupted. Again, the difference here is not "error handling policy" but the longer term consequences of shared vs. isolated memory spaces. If you just type up idiomatic Erlang OTP code, you have to go out of your way to not have a bulletproof server; if you just type up idiomatic Go code it's on you to make sure you're not excessively sharing state and that you aren't going to see your entire server doing tens of thousands of things come down due to one unhandled exception. Go programmers need to be more worried about error handling in practice than Erlang programmers, since Erlang programmers aren't facing the termination of the entire world if they screw up one thing.

There's also a recurring pattern in newer language advocates in which they will in one year claim it's a good thing that they don't have X, and next year tout to the high heavens how wonderful it is that they just implemented X. I went around with the Haskell world on a couple of those issues ("no, strings are not linked lists of numbers", "yes they are you're just not thinking functionally and inductively dude, and by the way, six months later, check out this totally radical ByteString library, and when that still turns out not to be stringy enough hey, check out Data.Text six months later..."). Thinking you can get away without OTP is likely to be one of those for Go. No. You need it, though I have questions about whether it can even be built in Go, because one of the other actual differences between the languages...

... which is Channels vs. Processes. Go has channels, but you can't tell who or what has them, and there's no such thing as a "goroutine reference". By contrast, Erlang has processes, but no way to tell what messages they may send or receive, and there's no such thing as a "channel". Again, this has major impacts on how the system is structured, in particular because it is meaningful to talk about how to restart a "process" in a way that it is not meaningful to talk about how to restart a "channel".

Go advocates desperately, desperately need to avoid the temptation to explain to themselves why Erlang isn't as good, because then they'll fail to learn the lessons that Erlang learned the easy way. There's a lot of ways to improve on Erlang, but let me tell you that despite those opportunities, Erlang as a language is one of the wisest languages around, you do not want to try to exceed it by starting from scratch. Learn from it, please, I want a better Erlang than Erlang, but talking yourself into how Go is already better than Erlang isn't going to get you there.