Personally I would use particles, at their default emitting form vertexes is what they do when set to emit form an objhect with a mni/directional, setting their speed to 0 so thay stay on the surface, you are then open top how you want to shade them (instances, points etc etc).

If you wanted to do the scripting then you would need to find the vertex names with a loop then for each vertex find the position using Xform which you can then use to position a cube. I did something similar for some research to pass mocap animated scanned data into FEA fluid analysis that required the vertex positions on a per frame basis.