I've used this enough, and seen it used enough, that it seems to make sense for it to be intrinsic to angular.
Semantic HTML is great, but not everything should be an anchor tag. We shouldn't need extra code to hyperlink from arbitrary elements.
2 cents.
app.controller('MainCtrl', function ($scope, $location) {
$scope.go = function (path) {
$location.path(path);
}
});