I entirely agree though my personal preference is for lattice over ggplot as it is faster and more flexible at the present time (the "limitations" of ggplot reflect the preference of the creator; e.g. not being able to have two axes for the same plot). But reshape and also plyr are quite useful.
R does have surprising capability for shell scripting and text processing, albeit slower than Python. I also use Python for the rapid text-processing necessary (possibly populating an SQL database) for R to eventually use.
I've been keeping an eye on SciPy, but there still seems to be a lot of "the source code is the documentation", whereas in R the documentation is usually superb and well-structured. And Matplotlib, while beautiful, seems to be more verbose than Matlab or R when it comes to customizing details of the graphics (e.g., axes, etc.). That's just my impression, but I wouldn't mind being shown otherwise.
R does have surprising capability for shell scripting and text processing, albeit slower than Python. I also use Python for the rapid text-processing necessary (possibly populating an SQL database) for R to eventually use.
I've been keeping an eye on SciPy, but there still seems to be a lot of "the source code is the documentation", whereas in R the documentation is usually superb and well-structured. And Matplotlib, while beautiful, seems to be more verbose than Matlab or R when it comes to customizing details of the graphics (e.g., axes, etc.). That's just my impression, but I wouldn't mind being shown otherwise.