Some things, maybe most things that a beginner wants to do are easy, but beyond the basics, R has a cliff for a learning curve. It's a complex language with some questionable design choices.
I agree with you about questionable design choices, I really don't like developing in R. But if you have some data and you want to know more about that data (data analysis), R + a small handful of packages is the best free environment that I know of. It's not just the basics, this can extend into fairly complex operations on your data (not to mention producing very pretty visualizations).
Data analysis is one of the most important steps in data science, so I think it's worth keeping R around.
