Yes, that's one way to describe what I'm hoping to do with this. The focus right now is on markdown, but since Pandoc supports so many input formats, it should be easy to add support for other formats like LaTeX once the markdown features stabilize. There isn't yet an equivalent of org-babel's ability to share data between code blocks, though I hope to add something similar eventually. The next big feature will probably be the ability to name code blocks, and then insert any combination of their code/output/errors at arbitrary other locations in the document.
Org is essentially tied to Emacs. Which is great if you use Emacs, but means you miss out on that functionality elsewhere.
If you're not using Emacs, pandoc is a great tool for converting documents (e.g. to HTML, to PDF). And a tool like codebrain would be useful for imitating some of the functionality that org-babel provides.