Well I have a mix of their free licenses (for open source projects) and paid licenses. I did pay for PyCharm and PHPStorm (and upgrades). Needless to say I do use commercial versions of all of them on an almost daily basis and I couldn't use anything else.
I could be wrong - but the way I understand IntelliJ language plugins is just really code autocomplete/syntax highlighting. PyCharm and PHPstorm have strong integration with the languages (debugging, inspectors, etc).
As an aside - for an individual license for IntelliJ $200 isn't a lot. Totally not rubbing it in but I've spent thousands of dollars on Visual Studio subscriptions (and I think they gave me a lifetime subscription of $50/month to Azure...). Check out bizspark - I definitely recommend it. Microsoft even waived the graduation fee for me.