I love pandas much more than R but GOD I love Rstudio. Such a great IDE. Rstudio server, actually. My equivalent is running ipython notebook on an ec2 instance, which....is fine, but is a lot of scrolling.
What do you love about pandas, is it performance, syntax, access to other python modules? If performance, take a look at R's data.table package: almost any manipulation can be done by reference.
For me, R was my first language, and then I learned Python, and beautiful things like list comprehensions, and it just clicks with my brain a bit more.
In pandas, a group by operation is beautiful
dataset2=dataset1.groupby([stuff], as_index=False).mean()
Same with pivot table...
When I did this with dplyr2 my work flow would be a few more steps, creating the "summarise" object and so forth and so on, which seems like more steps.