Yeah definitely. That being said, conda competes pretty effectively in the scientific/numeric space, because pip does not solve the problems that these people have, and for quite some time would cheerfully break the environments of said people.
Very much so. As a bioinformatician, for me conda has become a central part of my workflow as a generic package manager through the conda-forge and bioconda channels. I know a few university HPC clusters that use it to handle software instead of e.g. environment modules.
