It's like you said, roughly, though it's certainly possible to use a system designed for concurrency without introducing non-determinism - by not letting the queues provided by the system (message queues, STM, locks, thread-safe data structures - whatever type of queue) affect semantics. As in, you could easily implement a nice load balancer in Go for computational code and you could implement a checker to make sure the code is deterministic, perhaps based on their race detector. I'm only saying that it should be done, not that it can't be done...

Erlang vs checkedthreads (or Cilk or anything C-based), computing an image convolution kernel or handling some other computational problem? I could, though I think such a showdown with Erlang predictably ripped to shreds would be trolling, and I really like Erlang - I don't necessarily like Armstrong's marketing where he says Erlang makes more sense than C for parallelizing computations (seriously - you gonna send the image sub-regions via message queues byte by byte?), but I like Erlang, and it'd be a pity if anyone looked at such a silly showdown and conclude that Erlang was inferior - it's not, it's just for different things entirely.