The way I personally use it ... I'd say you're exactly right. And adding that to an easy cross compilation/platform story that can side-step C toolchains in many cases, garbage collection, and intelligible concurrency, and you've got an extremely useful tool.
So the main reasons for Go are the fact 'coproc' keyword added to Bash since version 4 is still considered experimental[1] and the fact that a vast majority of modern developers don't know shell good enough.