Python gets to be faster, easier, multithreaded, and useful beyond data science. R gets slower, weird syntax, single-threaded, and exists solely to make statisticians feel special. The "essentially only used for data science" part is doing some heavy lifting here. Like, congratulations R, you've cornered the market on being the one-trick pony that academia refuses to let go of. Meanwhile Python is out here running web servers, automating infrastructure, and training neural networks while R is still trying to figure out why <- seemed like a good assignment operator. Sure, R has ggplot2. Python has everything else.