It's actually annoying Go is shown as a web language in many tutorials. It's simply not. If you use Go for systems programming and other stuff like creating daemons, services, you will fall in love with it more and will not go back to any other language. That's why I believe those Go start tutorials should not be showing the net/http side of things.
Go definitely shines as a server language, so I think some kind of server is indeed the best way to illustrate Go's capabilities. It's true that net/http is kind of... boring, and maybe not the best choice for a beginner tutorial due to some of its quirks, but it has the benefit of being a well-understood reference point.
In reality, this tutorial is about making the API calls and decoding their JSON responses, and then introducing some concurrency to do multiple calls in parallel. The HTTP portion of this tutorial functions as some familiar ground for newbies, a nice way to get a grasp of the Go style in a context that many people understand.
