It's all about trade-offs. GC does eat more memory but with the proliferation of reasonably sized chunks of RAM on ARM embedded systems for example, it's of little concern. Not only that, you reduce the time to market and likelyhood of your code falling over due to pointer and memory problems. That is probably preferred (in my experience) when your product is in situ and has no form of upgrade possible other than shipping an engineer out to do it.
The cheapest ARM chips are still total overkill for most retail embedded electronic devices and many times more expensive per unit.
The cheapest ATTiny AVR chip is $0.60/ea bulk. The cheapest ARM chip like an AT91 is about $4.00/ea bulk. Ship a few million units and suddenly the cost difference between developing in C and Go is pittance.
