Stuffz
You probably have the same problem with FO1 I've been having with FO2. You never really got into it, because judging from your post, you really missed some parts.
First of all, there is a somewhat coherent story/plot/background, that, in my opinion, is rather well written for a videogame, too. There are lots of sidequests, most of them with the same love for detail, most of them with consequences, some of them even affect the main plot.
The UI is actually decent, you just need two mouse buttons (and in case you want to use your skills, it's good to know they are mapped on the number keys, I think it's 1-8). The rest of the interface, the functions you don't need that often (apart from the inventory, which probably can be opened by pressing "i") are accessed via those plastic buttons.
This button interface is all part of the fifties-feel of the game. Fallout always tried to recreate that bomb-fear-feel of the time when the US government showed educational movies that taught you to cover below your desk with a paper bag above your head is good to protect yourself from nuclear bombs. Something like that. And if you ignore for a second that, back then, they didn't have any technology for PDAs smaller than a house, and just assumed they would be able to build one small enough to carry...
it would look like a pip-boy.
The whole advertisement around the vaults, all the little movies about the G.E.C.K. (i think thats FO2), everything just fits and works. If those things would have existed back then, that's probably how they would have looked, without that little bit of black humour, that sticks to everything in FO, of course.
I think that's some thing that totally caught me with ye olde fallout: the graphics were SO crappy, and they STILL managed to pull of a real cool and coherent design. (intro videos, cutscenes, menuscreens, aforementioned PIP-boy, pip pictures in the character screen, and so on and so forth).
Tbh, I'm still pondering if I want a PIP-Boy tattooed