<p>I invested some time into learning R and would prefer not to learn Python or Ruby just for convenience of parsing XML.</p>

<p>I am not a pro R programmer so I need a higher level library then XML package of R.
getNodeSet and XPath is very hard to use.</p>

<p>raygozak answered the first part of your question: Bioconductor is the nearest equivalent for R of the Bio* libraries.  Unfortunately, it does not include a package to handle EUtils queries.</p>
<p>I appreciate your difficulties when using R to parse XML; compared with other languages it is not very intuitive and the documentation is poor (lots of it but rather technical).  However, I think you may just have to bite the bullet and get to grips with the R XML library.  There are a few good tutorials and blog posts around on the Web (see comments under your question). </p>
<p>There are also some good examples in Chapter 8 of the book <em>Bioinformatics and computational biology solutions using R and Bioconductor</em>, some of which you can read at <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=e8-CfJ5RIgAC&amp;pg=PA137&amp;lpg=PA137&amp;dq=bioconductor+eutils&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=J3RAKNdrdf&amp;sig=r28lhq7wTsY2OWHNwLpVQgKVCCs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=IvA1T9mUL_CamQWG7OWOAg&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">Google Books</a>.</p>