I think a better analogy would be how large swathes of the population use Windows for everyday computation and treat Linux as a toy, whereas individuals with more domain knowledge take Linux seriously and use it in production in a variety of environments (e.g., high frequency trading, web hosts, commerce sites, etc). Engineers may prefer MATLAB as a "serious" development environment, but most software developers find it to be seriously lacking. Most general purpose programming languages are far more powerful than MATLAB, but simply lack the toolboxes/convenience. Both of these points are nothing new and have been observed since the creation of MATLAB (indeed, the latter is the reason why MATLAB was created, since MATLAB is basically supposed to be a pretty face for FORTRAN).