Oh, could you please show me some code that does this (a 'channel between boxes'), and supports sending of exactly the same data types that you send over a regular Go channel?
Using the old deprecated netchan package doesn't count ;).
There's gob ( http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/gob/ ). Not going to claim it's on the level of node communication in Erlang, but it does make data (de)serializaiton incredibly simple. With only a few lines of code you could have a channel reading from and writing to a socket to another machine.
Akka does that as well, and you're right, it's very important for writing declarative, distributed logic. Akka's ActorRef abstracts over the physical location of the actor, just as Erlang's PIDs do.
The fact that, as opposed to to Goroutines, Erlang processes can be transparently running on some other node is the most important difference.