Yes, it is. David Smith is a great blogger (and wrote the original ESS and a first draft of an Introduction to R), but he's somewhat hamstrung by the nature of his job. That being said, the Task views are not a friendly interface unless you're familiar with the material already (i.e. by having used psychometrics or something before).
R has frequently been a source of inspiration for me. (I mention his briefly here: http://mvz.so/articles/lend-a-hand-to-science.html) It appears, to me, as an example of a tool that has done and continues to do its job, for the benefit of all mankind. This isn't to say it couldn't have been done better, but I'm consistently impressed by the wide-ranging use and love that R finds in so many fields, and by the breadth of people who use it, most of whom would never call themselves programmers. I can't figure out what exactly R got right, but I often think it has something to do with the fact that it was created by someone who called himself a statistician, not a programmer.
Slightly OT, but I wouldn't say that R was "built for large scale analytics." You have to go through some serious hoops to work on anything in R that takes up more than 50% or so of available RAM. Revolution Analytics's R build is designed for it, and some standalone packages like bigmemory can make R work better with large data sets, but vanilla R is awful for the task.
