That's terrific news! GOPATH and the file system conventions are horrible for me as well. It forces me to break my personal conventions and workflow that I use for every other language. I avoid using go for new projects now because it got to be so annoying and disruptive (a somewhat shallow reason, I know).
Don't get too excited. You don't have to place your projects within $GOPATH anymore, but all your dependencies are still forcefully downloaded to – and imported from – the shared $GOPATH. AFAIK they didn't provide a way to have your dependencies localized to a subdirectory of your project's root. The documentation for "go mod vendor"[1] makes it seem like it should accomplish that task, but I couldn't get it to work for initial pull of dependencies – it only worked after dependencies were already downloaded to $GOPATH, at which point it was willing to make a copy of it within the project.
[1] "... or to ensure that all files used for a build are stored together in a single file tree, 'go mod vendor' creates a directory named vendor in the root directory of the main module and stores there all the packages from dependency modules"
That ended up being the biggest hurdle for me. I wanted a single repository with some Go source code, some Python, some C++, and I didn’t want to have to put the repo in a specific place or set environment variables for every project.
Nowadays I just put my Go source code in <repo>/go/src/example.com/pkgname and that works well enough, but it's a bit clumsy and reminds me of bad experiences navigating Java source trees. I haven’t switched to modules yet but I will once I get 1.12 everywhere.
