Not an expert here, but I have dabbled with both R and Python.

For learning and even publication purposes, I'd consider looking at Jupyter Notebooks: http://jupyter.org/

There's still some configuration involved to get it to work, but most of the required libraries should come bundled in the installation.

As for learning those tools -- probably just do a few quick tutorials to get the gist of Pandas/Numpy, and then slowly try migrating small data projects that you'd normally do in R to Python.