One of the things you might find particularly appealing about Dashboards is that you can work directly from a few of the Activity and Opportunity list view components. You might be looking at your Top 10 Opportunities and realize that you left out a very important new Opportunity; you can add it on-the-fly and the Dashboard component will update to reflect your change.
The options for each Dashboard component vary slightly. For example, you can schedule a new appointment from the My Schedule-At-A-Glance component or delete an Opportunity from the Top 10 Opportunities component.
Most of the Dashboard components aren't helpful unless they contain some data. However, because you can add information to the following components it doesn't matter if they start out empty:
My Schedule At-A-Glance
Activity List
Top 10 Opportunities