Summary
While this document is long and detailed, the actual design reduces to a few major points.
Functions and types can have type parameters, which are defined using optional contracts.
Contracts describe the methods required and the builtin types permitted for a type argument.
Contracts describe the methods and operations permitted for a type parameter.
Type inference will often permit omitting type arguments when calling functions with type parameters.
This design is completely backward compatible, in that any valid Go 1 program will still be valid if this design is adopted (assuming contract is treated as a pseudo-keyword that is only meaningful at top level).
We believe that this design addresses people's needs for generic programming in Go, without making the language any more complex than necessary.
We can't truly know the impact on the language without years of experience with this design. That said, here are some speculations.