If there is anything in R that is better, it could be ported. It's kind of different from language intrinsics that can't be easily ported. In fact I think there's a great argument for writing a standardized data processing and visual representation layer in C++, and then making it usable from all the languages.
It would be nice if this was true for the notebook layer.
It's the domain knowledge that's difficult. Like the example up thread about the lack of generalised additive models. The version in R was written originally by the developers of the method. There's no Python version because no one with sufficient expertise has ported it.
Don't get me wrong, I know mostly write Python because it's a better general purpose language but there are big big tradeoffs.
