pseudo-color questions

Until contouring is implemented, the only way to display 2D data is by pcolor.
I have two observations:

(1) While trying to figure out exactly what pcolor was doing ( I did not understand the
grid registration) I looked into the matlab documentation. The matlab docs explained
what was going on, so that I could get my values properly aligned on the grid.
This brings up a question - How close does matplotlib follow Matlab? Will there always
be such a close correspondence in the implementation of functions such as I found in pcolor?

(2) To do quantitative representation using pcolor, a colorbar function is needed. This feature does not
appear on the list of future goals, I would like it to be added. I'm not that competent, but I will
give it a try myself. The first few easy things I tried did not work out.