Converting from EPS to SVG format
Currently what's working best for me on linux is the following:
epstopdf foo.eps
pdf2svg foo.pdf foo.svg
I believe the first command is a wrapper for ghostscript, and the second is a wrapper for calls to the Poppler and Cairo libraries. On ubuntu, they're in the packages texlive-font-utils and pdf2svg. Gradients come out looking right, but don't seem to be editable in inkscape.
I tried using inkscape and uniconverter for this purpose, and as of Jan 2013, both seemed broken when tested on an example containing nothig but some very simple line art. Inkscape throws errors and can't open the eps file. Uniconverter crashes.
Scribus and sk1 may work, but seem awkward and not really suited for this task.
Uniconvertor is currently the most convenient option.
It's a command-line tool that shares code with the sK1 Project. You won't have to bother cropping the image in sK1 if you use uniconvertor, so it's more automated.
Run it like this:
uniconvertor before.eps after.svg
And that's it. I tried it on one EPS, but the SVG was offset improperly, but it may work for you.
Here's a list of alternatives and reasons why they suck:
The sK1 Project
It has the sense of a "page" that you put your drawing on, so after you import an EPS, you have to move it around and manually crop the page.
ImageMagick
For EPS to SVG conversion, ImageMagick does some really stupid bitmap conversion and will render SVG files that are 50mb, when they should be a few kb. It doesn't actually have a real vector conversion algorithm for these formats.
InkScape
Every time I've converted an EPS with InkScape, it's messed up the colours. This is due to an Inkscape bug with importing EPS files. (Update: Fix Released for this bug on February 2015)
Gimp
Gimp just does the same stupid bitmap conversion that ImageMagick does.
Scribus
It gets the colours of my EPS file even more wrong than Inkscape, while Preview for Mac can read it just fine.
You should be able to open the EPS in inkscape and save as SVG from there.
Make sure to save as Plain SVG not inkscape SVG for better comparability. Adobe illustrator can do the same thing, its not free, but the trial version is.