You also tend to overlook/ignore the "if err != nil" in every other line, which Google seems to push. There is really no silver bullet for error handling, and sometimes you need more than one approach. However, I think exceptions are usually the best, especially because they work very well with RAII.

It would be great to have some function annotations to show which exceptions can be thrown, though. But still, keep in mind tha Google's style is pretty much equivalent to having a catch(...) after every call.