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[Sadrice]

This might be an old idea, but I've never seen it before.  so, pressure is transmitted orthogonally.  water can flow diagonally, but it wont teleport from a higher location through a diagonal gap to a lower location.  this means that if you want to drop water from, say, the surface to the magma sea, so long as the pipe ends in a diagonal exit below the rim of your cistern, it will never overflow, despite the immense pressure.  It actually wont flow very fast, so you might need a sort of diagonal grating to fill a large cistern in a reasonable amount of time. 


You can also use a barrier of columns in a checkerboard pattern to slow flowing water to almost a halt.  the water will build up against it like a wall, and if there are more than five or so diagonal steps that it has to take, almost none will come through.  the water behind it won't "push" it through, it has to slowly trickle.  these sorts of barriers barely slow dwarves down, are much easier to trap than an open space, and block crossbow fire until the goblin is all the through, and conveniently adjacent to  your chained up war crocodiles.

EDIT:  so I look at the forum and just down the page someone has a brilliant idea for using diagonal flow, for water reactors instead of cisterns. 

[Uristocrat]

I basically already do this on my wells.  Every time water gets stacked on top of other tiles of water, there's a + sign of walls (with no wall in the middle) so that once it falls into the middle of that + sign, it has to go out of there diagonally.

[darkflagrance]

I once created a Deep City 20 or so z-levels below the surface, with a river running through the middle lined with apartments. I used a diagonal depressurizer to have the brook water from the surface provide my underground city with plumbing.

[Ampersand]

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Pressure#Diagonal_Flow Basically exactly this has been up on the wiki for a while now. You are correct in that water does end up flowing in a trickle when pushed through checkerboard type arrangements, but this can be counteracted just by making the area where it's flowing through wider in the manner described on the wikipage.