additionally, whats with all the clipboards (finance, medical, etc) ? i have yet to see an actual use for these, i see them just about everywhere.
Nothing. They were carried over with most of the random game crap from Fallout 3, and have no purpose beyond being random crap. The ham radios actually had a real interactive purpose sometimes in Fallout 3, at the handful of hidden transmission sites. Finding them and clicking on them would activate a radio channel... nothing much came of doing so, though, other than a game announcement of "another radio channel discovered", or some such. And of course you got the goody loot from the hidden radio transmitter location, as a side benefit.
In NV, they are just atmosphere.