I don't have a lot of experience with either, but I was close to really digging in and learning R just for the ease of use of ggplot.

I tried the ggplot for python (ggplot.yhathq.com/) but eventually settled for seaborn (http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/). It is really quite easy to get most of the common plots that I wanted and hasn't let me down yet. The standard plots look SO much better than the standard plots of MPL without a lot of customization.