I don't think you can judge a language completely in isolation from its community. There are features of R that make it particularly well suited for statistical computing (vector-oriented, missing values at fundamental level, ...). Those features influenced early statistical adopters, which in turn lead to a virtuous cycle: as more statistical/data analysis functionality was available in R, the more obvious it made as a first choice for statistics/data analysis.

It's also worth bearing in mind that python has only become a reasonable competitor to R (for statistics) in the last couple of years. Without pandas and IPython, python is a much less compelling option, especially given that most R users are not programmers and just want to figure out what's going on in their data.

(And thanks for the kind words :)