Now R has some useful packages like ggmap, mapdata and ggplot2 which allow you to source you map satellite images directly from google maps, but this does require a free google API key to source from the cloud. These packages can also plot the map around the data as I am currently trimming the map to fit the data. But for a fair test I also used a simplistic pre-built map in R. This was from the package rworldmap, which allows plotting at a country level with defined borders. Axes can be scaled to act like a zoom function but without a higher resolutions map or raster satellite image map it is pointless to go past a country level.
There’s a lot more you can do with both languages, but when you just want a plot in a few lines of code, both are up to the task.