[blt]

Even if some of the components in Mathematica are not state-of-the-art, there's a huge synergy benefit from having everything together in one environment, using the same datatypes. I think that's the big benefit of Mathematica and Matlab. Python can match (or exceed) a lot of their capabilities but you spend all this time with package managers, converting data types, etc.

[brianwawok]

What is this time with package managers? Takes an hour one time to learn pip and virtualenv. Then its 1 pip command to install a package.

[aisofteng]

An hour? I'd say about five minutes.