I do agree that stats people love R. This is one of the reasons I wrote this article. So that I can leverage all the good work they've gone. It is way better to write a wrapper than to reimplement everything from scratch. I'm coming from academia where I have a lot of systems work. So, I tend to be Python first user. But, I do want to utilise all the packages that are exclusively available in R.

Packaging is improving in Python afaik. People like Anaconda!