What bugged me about Matlab are the things that should be easy, but aren't. Subplots? Sure, easy enough. What about subplots with a different colour map for each plot? Nope. You can do it, but it's a third party extension. There are lots of little niggles like this, particularly around visualisation, that are annoying when you're paying thousands of dollars for a product. Particularly when they're all doable in Matplotlib without any effort...
We were told at the start of a physics degree, that they never cared how good our initial knowledge of physics was. Physics can always be taught, but mathematics is much more fundamental and important to understand. The same goes for this. You can always learn a new tool, but if you don't know what to do with it then you're out of luck. I fail to see why Google wouldn't hire a competent statistician (of which there are very few) if they only knew Python or R.
As an aside, I thought most stats schools use R almost exclusively these days (some are moving to Python)? Matlab is the engineering pet.