The chess match between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov seemed to receive more press than the recent go match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, which is strange given how much harder it is for a program like AlphaGo to win at go than Deep Blue to win at chess.
The coverage might be cultural. While almost everyone is familiar with chess and understands how hard it is, many people have never played go. As a result, they don't understand that it would be impossible to brute force a solution.
Most of my non-technical friends are under the impression that this was inevitable, even though experts postulated this wouldn't happen for another 10 years. Maybe it's because terms like deep learning have gone mainstream. And, not knowing what they mean, people assume that computers are already capable of tackling any problem.