1). No. As explained in the post, the data "exchange" is accomplished by creating another variable of similar type in the destination kernel so the resulting variable is independent of the homonymous variable in the sending kernel. No third-party modules such as rpy or R.matlab is used.

2). That is certainly on our radar after JupyterLab matures and provides a stable API. The core of SoS Notebook (namely the data exchange model) should be easy to port but the entire frontend would need to be rewritten.