[hharrison]

Yep, ggplot is the one thing that I keep coming back to R for, plus the odd statistical model I can't find in statsmodels - which is rarer and rarer.

One of the many awesome features of IPython - the interactive python shell and notebook, is that you can call code blocks in R just by prefacing with %%R. So my plotting habits are usually first to try the python port of ggplot, and if that can't handle my situation I just jump into R without having to switch windows or do any complicated data transfer.

It's worth mentioning that matplotlib is designed to mimic Matlab's plotting API, so for people coming from Matlab there's very little change, plus there's all the benefits of the other plotting libraries others have mentioned.