Containers are useful for a variety of things... I've needed to use them twice in the game I'm writing, but I've just got around them with commands. You can use them to hide objects so the player has to search, or you can use them to complete tasks "put ballot in box" kinda thing.
I guess you could limit them to being unmovable scenery objects, and the person has to look at them or open them to bring the contained objects on or in (depending on type) to having the same parent as the parent object... If they're not a scenery object, they're a bag where the things inside aren't reachable by default. I'm spoiled by using Quest which has a bloody complex container system with surface, bag, seethrough, opaque and all kinds of other containers :D haha.
I guess you could make the inbuilt bag functions pretty basic, and let advanced people write scrips if they want to make them more flexible. Having object ON a scenery object might just add (on Table) or somesuch to the description, and that's all!