if you're using surface render - hard/soft surface fiddle around with the surface threshold and surface tolerance, that should get you started to fixing your penetration problem...

if you're using volume render, just keep fiddling with the opacity graph and also make use of texturing in the fluid container...

the only bad thing about messing with the surface threshold and tolerance is if you have a transparent container like a glass or a coke bottle you lose the effect in which case particles would help out the situation a little maybe even more to give it a splashy feel when it hits the surface...

another difference is you're not using a volume emitter also, though volume emitters in this kind of simulation are funky and hard to get going most of the time... but this sounds like you've got it set to omni in which case will cause a penetration...

for true liquid collisions use realflow you'll get much better simulations for this type of scene