The battle between R and NumPy reminds me of the competition between American and Japanese auto manufacturers. Did American car companies successfully play QA catchup in the past 10 years? Probably, and God knows they needed to. Meanwhile, Japanese car manufacturers were building on 35 years of QA excellence the whole time.

I would be far more excited about the possibilities created by a cornucopia of new stats/dataviz functionality built into Python than I would be about some packages that make R a bit less terrible to write.