Not really, if you learn Cypher you should be fine learning the basics of Gremlin, SPARQL, or other languages to operate on graphs in a few hours.

There was some post about enabling SPARQL in Neo4J, but when you install Neo4J it comes with cypher by default (not sure if it supports anything else).

I use Apache Jena + SPARQL, but had to use Neo4J to help in a master thesis. Took me a few hours of "How the heck can I do that same thing I'd do in SPARQL that way?", plus some reading of the tutorials.

Edit: some old post with example of Cypher, Gremlin and SPARQL: http://kinoshita.eti.br/2014/09/09/cypher-gremlin-and-sparql...

You can definitely run gremlin queries against Neo4j by a couple of methods.

One example: https://github.com/thinkaurelius/neo4j-gremlin-plugin

Also can use the Tinkerpop3 or Blueprints APIs to access your graph with Gremlin.

Cypher expressses the graph patterns that you're looking for in an ASCII-art-syntax, so you don't loose sight of the core of your question. On top of that you get filtering, projection, aggregation, pagination.

The most fun things are in-query dataflow which allows you to pass information from one query part to the next (projected, aggregated, ordered etc).

And the really cool collection and map functions, so you save a lot of roundtrips between client and server.

See: http://neo4j.com/developer/guide-sql-to-cypher/