Absolutely. I usually respond to the "R-is-not-a-real-language" line with something like "R is syntactic sugar on a Lisp where the atoms are APL arrays". It's plenty interesting from a computer science perspective, if you bother to look.

For instance, why does R use <- instead of = for assignment? Because initial versions (of S) predate C -- developed down the hall -- the language that first introduced = for assignment.