I don't really follow what in your example shows "gross mishandling of whitespace".

The most popular languages are C, C++, Java and C# and Go's syntax is very similar to those. If anything, Python is the weird one in how it treats the whitespace and hence most likely to confuse people coming from other languages.

As to optional semicolon elision - what is the problem with that? They make the code cleaner looking and gofmt will remove them for you even if you forget due to C/Java reflexes. I don't see the downside of making them optional.