I'm not really understanding some of the discussion over the last 2 pages.
Yes, it is a true flagship camera.
But also yes, it is aimed at (or optimized towards) sports photography.
It feels like a lot of the above discussion is assuming that it has to be one or the other, can't be both. But it is both. It is a flagship camera optimized for sports photography. Obviously it's not limited to that, but it's optimized towards it. Heavily so. Tradeoffs were made. Readout speed was increased from the R3 at the cost of some ISO performance, and reaching 40FPS put limits on the sensor resolution.
In my opinion, a higher megapixel "version" of an R1 flagship could be considered more flexible for various photography use cases than the current R1, for anything but the highest-burst rate, lowest-light applications. The current R1 doesn't allow a lot of room for cropping and it doesn't have the highest amount of resolution for landscape or portrait photography, or even animal photography.
As I had said earlier in this thread: I wouldn't mind if the R1 had been a bit more "balanced" in its specs, leaning slightly less towards sports. That doesn't stop it from being the best camera that I have ever owned by a huge margin, though.