I'm not a big Python fan, frankly. But R is painful enough for me to keep looking around. Right now my workflow is to do all my data processing in another language and just use R for plotting.
With the Apache Arrow project, my understanding is that there will be an opportunity for languages like R, Python w/Pandas to share in-memory dataframe structures. I could imagine a future world where much tighter interaction with languages like lisps or Haskell.