I must admit, that sounds plausible and I'm not an expert with Matlab or Octave, but I understand the compatibility is reasonable but nowhere near complete. There seem to be a pretty good number of problems discussed here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3534867/why-when-should-i...

But really I just feel like (certainly in my field) the open source community around R is huge and thriving and it's a better bet than Octave in terms of that.

lack of toolboxes