It took them like a decade to get there though, all the while telling the entire non-Google world that they must be doing something wrong if they want versioning for their dependencies.
The problem was that there were no dependency solutions at the time that really nailed it. Most systems used something similar to Ruby's Bundler system, which was terrible to work with. Personally I like that the Go team is patient and takes the long view when adding features to the core tool set and language.
That was never the position and lots of third party tools sprung up to make things work once the vendor folder was added in Go 1.5. That was three years after the language was released.
