This kind of labelling has always been cumbersome in Matlab. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that this important functionality is included in freeware like R but not in sth as expensive as Matlab. I just had to create a scatter plot of a cyclone track through the SW Indian Ocean and needed to add time & date labels to each cyclone position. In R it looks rather nice, in Matlab it is a disaster.
One workaround may be
gtextm('String')
which places the labels manually, but if you have like 30 of them this isn't much fun.
