SAS and R

Hi Eric,
I've started listening to your podcast, starting from the older episodes. It's great, your explanations are clear and very illuminating. I come from a SAS background, as you yourself said in the first podcast. I'm quite used to the PDV concept, so understanding R code is a bit tricky at first.
A question I have is related to the intersection between R and SAS, notably, PROC IML. Do you know anything about it? I understand it is SAS's way of "interpreting R", but I'm curious as to what's the difference between actually using R and PROC IML. I know there are some books dedicated to this, but I'd like to hear if the R community has tried it.
Also, I understand some SAS products, specifically SAS Enterprise Miner, has open source nodes for importing and using open source code (R, Python, etc). Have you ever used this functionality? Currently, I use SAS daily, but I'd like to add some R functionality into SAS, since some things are just simpler to write in R than SAS.
Regards, Erich K.