Comment 2 for bug 1234405

Inkscape uses ps2pdf from Ghostscript to convert the EPS file to PDF [1], and then imports the PDF file using internal routines.

You can test on the command line yourself:
$ ps2pdf -dEPSCrop VariousGammaA5.eps VariousGammaA5-ps2pdf.pdf

and view that PDF file with your preferred PDF viewer: same result as what is imported in Inkscape (elements overlapping the borders of the portrait page (Ghostscript uses a system default for the page size) sometimes are clipped, those completely outside appear to be omitted completely).

Ghostscript manual:
<quote>
-dEPSCrop
    Crop an EPS file to the bounding box. This is useful when converting an EPS file to a bitmap.
</quote>
<http://ghostscript.com/doc/current/Use.htm#EPS_parameters>

(I get the same cropped PDF file as result when testing each of the two other EPS-specific options which Ghostscript offers).

--
[1] <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/RELEASE_0_48_BRANCH/view/head:/share/extensions/ps2pdf-ext.py#L28>