The biggest draw to me is actually the non-visual part of it. I don't get hung up on silly visual things such as column width. Or, where to put the plots I make.
Granted, this has its own downsides. But so far I'm loving it. And yes, being able to essentially save off just what I did so that I can rerun the same tasks again later on a new data set is really really nice.
The nice thing about that outlook is that you can essentially automate tasks you would normally perform on a spreadsheet.