Not to poke holes in this but is this actually that hard ?

    import pandas as pd
    from sklearn.linear import SVC

    df = pd.read_csv('/home/me/programming/data.csv')
    y = df['label']
    X = df.drop('label', axis=1)

    clf = SVC()
    clf.fit(X, y)

... Most of the things have a similar API, except for when I veer off into say deep-learning land.

This is not to say that R is a bad language, or that R does not have equally nice API's for this stuff; but I feel that in your case its a familiarity of language thing.