The primary thing people seem to like about Go is that it produces single native binaries. You can do that with Java too (I gave an example of Avian further up the thread), but people don't tend to bother because distributing a single JAR is not much harder and avoids any assumptions about what OS the recipient might have. Go users seem invariably to be writing programs for their own use and Go doesn't really "do" shared libraries, so they don't ever encounter the problem of distributing a binary of the wrong flavour because they don't distribute binaries at all.
By the way, in Java 8 there's a tool that produces Mac, Linux and Windows standalone packages and installers that don't depend on any system JVM. I've used it to distribute software successfully, although I had to make my own online update system for it. In Java 9 it's being extended quite a bit with the new "jlink" tool that does something similar to static linking ... the output of jlink is either a directory that's a standalone JRE image optimised and stripped to have only the modules your app needs, or you can combine it with the other tool to get a MacOS DMG (with an icon, code signing etc), Windows MSI/EXE (ditto), or a Linux DEB/RPM/tarball.
This isn't a single file at runtime of course, it's a single directory, but basically any complex native app will have data files and some sort of package too so that's not a big deal.
