- Native executable support on all major platforms
- He doesn't seen to believe that AOT compiled C# can give the best possible performance on all major platforms
- Good control of the layout of data structures
- Had to have garbage collection
- Great concurrency support
- Simple, easy to approach, and great tooling
One other thing I forgot to mention was that he talked about how the current compiler was mostly written as more or less pure functions operating on data structures, as opposed to being object oriented, and that this fits very well with the Go way of doing things, making 1:1 port much easier.
If doing a web server, on the other hand, these things wouldn't matter at all as you would be running a container anyway.