This is how I see it too. Let me expand a bit. I think that there is a belief -- one that I have shared from time to time -- that it is not helpful to use familiar keywords unless the semantics are a perfect match, the concern being that they will setup an intuition that will lead people astray. I think that is a danger, but it works both ways: those intuitions also help people to understand, particularly in the early days. So it's a question of "how far along will you get before the differences start to matter" and "how damaging is it if you misunderstand for a while".
I'll share an anecdote. I was talking at a conference to Joe Armstrong and I asked him for his take on Elixir. He was very positive, and said that he was a bit surprised, because he would have expected that using more familiar, Ruby-like syntax would be confusing, since the semantics of Erlang can at times be quite different. But that it seemed that the opposite was true: people preferred the familiar syntax, even when the semantics had changed. (I am paraphrasing, obviously, and any deviance from Joe's beliefs are all my fault.)
I found that insight pretty deep, actually. It's something that I've had kicking around in my brain -- and I know people in this community and elsewhere have told me before -- but somehow it clicked that particular time.
Rust has a lot of concepts to learn. If we are going to succeed, it's essential that people can learn them a bit at a time, and that we not throw everything at you at once. I think we should always be on the lookout for places where we can build on intuitions from other languages; it doesn't have to be a 100% match to be useful.