No, R is a serious general purpose programming language that is great for building almost any type of complex scientific software with. Projects like Bioconductor are a good example.

Perhaps a in a context of comparison with Python?

In my limited experience, Using R feels like to using JavaScript in the browser: it's a platform heavily focused on advanced, feature-rich objects (such as DataFrames and specialized plot objects). but you could also just build almost anything with it.