They're similar, but Go channels are
unbuffered,
They can be either buffered or unbuffered, and some designs will deadlock with unbuffered channels but not with channels of even size 1. Pipes are of course buffered; I think that unbuffered channels are actually the special case, even though for whatever reasons Go tutorials always talk about unbuffered channels first.
(I hold similar views about eq? and eqv?: eq? is a special-purpose speed hack, eqv? is Scheme's identity predicate.)