I would like to add further information to this bug report. The problems I describe happen for me on inkscape 0.46-0ubuntu2, but the origin (in my opinion) of the problem, namely eps import through pstoedit -f plot-svg, has been there since May 2007. I will also add some files to reproduce these problems.

Inkscape shows several bugs when importing eps. Internally, inkscape uses pstoedit -f plot-svg to convert eps to svg. Some of the problems experienced in inkscape also happen in other programs, such as svg viewers as eog or firefox and are thus not a problem of inkscape, but due to pstedit creating messy svgs. Other problems however are inkscape specific.

Consider the file original.svg containing a rectangle and the letters aeodqb (which all contain some sort of white space fully enclosed by black lines). When this file is exported as EPS (original.eps), it displays nicely  in all kind of applications, such as gv etc.

However, when this EPS file is opened again in inkscape, all kinds of problems happen:

A) Openining the EPS file in inkscape (as opposed to importing)
A.1) All the "holes" in the letters are filled
A.2) The bounding box does not enclose the figure, but is much larger. In addition, the figure is shifted outside the bounding box.
A.3) Probably due to the strange bounding box, inkscape creates some huge drawing area that you can scroll with the scroll bars. The figure is not centered, but at the upper left corner. It can be hard to find it again, when you scrolled away, simply because the figure is very tiny compared to the whole drawing area.
A.4) When inserting text, the text size is always increased to 23040 and cannot be made smaller.
A.5) The thickness of the contour lines is set to 720.
A.6) Eventually, after drawing some things, inkscape simply behaves weird and doesn't do anything useful any more.

B) Importing the EPS file
B.1) All the "holes" in the letters are filled
B.2) The bounding box does not enclose the figure, but is much larger.
B.3) The imported figure is tiny. In fact, it is so tiny that it is almost impossible to find it again, if you deselect it before making it bigger.
(The other problems of A don't appear here)

This confirms the observations of the previous bug report, and adds more information (filled letters, bounding box.) Unlike the previous bug reporter, I did not find any difference between opening an eps in inkscape and converting it before with pstoedit -f plot-svg. Both ways give the same behaviour for me.

Problems A/B.1 and A/B.2 are in fact a problem of the svg generated from pstoedit -f plot-svg . Consider the file svg-frompstoedit.svg and the screenshot showing eog displaying this svg (The same happens for firefox). The wrong bounding box and the filled letters also happen there. The problem of filled letters can be solved with the pstoedit option -ssp (see file svg-frompstoedit-wit-ssp.svg), but I haven't found a solution to the bounding box problem yet. 

In contrast, previously inkscape used pstoedit -f sk and then skconvert to convert an eps to svg. Doing this manually (files sk-frompstoedit.sk and svg-fromskconvert.svg) and then opening the resulting svg works flawlessly.

As it is now, the EPS import of inkscape is not useful at all. I would suggest to avoid using pstoedit -f plot-svg and to revert to the old behaviour. This requires the skencil package to be installed, but at least it works.