It's a pity this is a comparison with Go 1.0.3. That's so old as to be a almost useless comparison given that everyone who's serious about Go uses something from the hg repository.
1.0.3 was the last stable release. 1.1 is the next stable release. Not everyone feels confident running testing repos for production systems (even if they are reported to be stable)
It's not very common. John (the GP) uses the Go bleeding edge at CloudFlare because he needs some of the recent improvements. To do this, he really needs to know what he's doing (and he does). Typical Go users just use the stable branch.
Yeah, especially now that the tip is Go 1.1 post-beta.
It's pretty common in any language that's seeing significant development, targeting a version that's not going to be too long in the tooth by the time you want to go to production.
