Difference Between Hadoop Mapreduce(Java) and RHadoop mapreduce
rhadoop (the part you are interested in is now called rmr2) is simply a client API for MapReduce written in R. You invoke MapReduce using R package APIs, and send an R function to the workers, where it is executed by an R interpreter locally. But it is otherwise exactly the same MapReduce.

You can call anything you like in R this way, but no R functions are themselves parallelized to use MapReduce in this way. The point is simply that you can invoke M/R from R. I don't think it somehow lets you do anything more magical than that.