Short answer: no, of course not. While any set of mathematical software packages will have their overlaps, they will always have biases towards certain problem domains. These biases figure strongly in whether or not you want to use one of these packages.
An example of what MATLAB can do that R cannot is interface to real-time hardware for signal processing/acquisition and control. A Simulink model in MATLAB can be configured both to run in simulation on your machine before compiling the code to execute on a real system taking measured data as input and calculating appropriate outputs (what was before a simulation of a control system is now a fully functioning one). With the appropriate hardware board in your machine, you can run real-time control systems through a PC.
R, by contrast, seems firmly set in the role of statistics, where I'm sure it out-performs what MATLAB can do. Similarly, Mathematica is better than MATLAB at symbolic maths; Python is better than MATLAB at general programming; gnuplot is better than all of them at actually creating graphs (er, I assume); and so on.