Data science is the process by which data becomes understanding, knowledge and insight.
Hadley Wickham
I still love R, perhaps to the chagrin of my students 😉 But yeah, coming from SPSS (or rather, $P$$), it’s really powerful with a fun community. Just the options of what you can do are … breathtaking. Just have a look at these cheatsheets (PDFs) from the rstudio::conference 2019 — and be overwhelmed (in a positive way … hmm, awestruck?).
However, one of the best introductions I have seen so far is this presentation by Hadley Wickham (some-when in 2018): “You can’t do data science in a GUI” (talk is about 42 minutes, rest is Q&A):
Well worth watching and showing the advantages of R.