The plplot.pc provided by the plplot-devel package on openSUSE has set includedir to include/plplot. This results in the following when running pkg-config --cflags --libs plplot: -Iinclude/plplot -lplplot. This however is wrong, as -Iinclude/plplot will have the compiler looking in <cwd>/include/plplot instead of /usr/include/plplot. Other libraries that use pkg-config properly output the absolute path for their includedirs.
I am one of the maintainers of plplot on openSUSE, I noticed this and we fixed this for our packages with the following patch:
Just an FYI