polygon buffers?

I dream with a GIS tool (A GIS display tool for R? An R plugging for 
Qgis? etc)
that could display spatial R objects. This is beyond current
tools, based on exporting (hence duplicating space and troubles)
R objects to other formats.

Oooh, you are giving me ideas! I've been working with R and QGIS for 
some time, linked by Python plugins.

  For example, my Basic Stats plugin for QGIS lets you do data summaries 
of QGIS layers (histograms of attributes, x-y plots etc):

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/Software/Spqr/

  This is only a small step from writing what's called a 'Provider' for 
QGIS, that could display sp-style data objects from R on the QGIS map 
canvas...

  If my Java skills were more developed I'd be working on something 
similar for OpenJUMP, which I think has all the topology operators like 
buffering that the original poster on this thread was interested in.

Barry