Okay, I finally got the launcher to work after uninstalling (Steam couldn't verify the game) and installing the game after another 20 minutes from the DVD drive.

NOW, the game apparently isn't even there.

I clicked the play button once and got "game not available at this time"

Clicking again I get this error:

"Fallout: New Vegas doesn't appear to be installed and the installer could not be found.
Try exploring your DVD-Rom and selecting the setup.exe to install the game"

I just reinstalled it, so what's going on?