> I haven't spent much time with dplyr, but I think it does a couple things

One of the cooler features in dplyr is the '%.%' operator which allows you to chain operations. So you can write something like this in dplyr:

  Batting %.%
    group_by(playerID) %.%
    summarise(total = sum(G)) %.%
    arrange(desc(total)) %.%
    head(5)

which is very readable. That example stolen shamelessly from [1] ;)

[1] -- http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/01/17/introducing-dplyr/