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[Foxite]

Ships would be used by other civs to get to your fort if going by wagon is not an option. They would arrive at a slower rate than with wagons, let's say once per 2 years. This also goes for sieges, but they would take a lot longer to arrive and would come far less times than when they would without a ship. Ambushes and thieves(including snatchers) would not come if the only way to get to your fort was with a ship.

When a trade delegation would arrive at your fort by ship, and your fort is at the edge of the sea, they would settle at a building called a Harbor. It is the same size as a trade depot and serves the same purpose as a Trade Depot, and would have to be placed next to at least one tile of water. This would normally be the sea. The plus side of this is that the ship has a far bigger weight capacity than wagons.

If a ship arrives and your fort is not at the edge of a wagon, then briefly after the ship has settled, wagons would come out of the ship by a gangplank. If you are lucky then you could see this happen in adventure mode. The wagons would then proceed to head for your fortress and trade there.

[Ribs]

It's planned. We'll probably have ships eventually, when Toady gets around to it. It seems like it will be extremelly hard to implement boats as a feature, though.

Here's a few transcripts from df talk:

Toady:   I remember I made that post. Someone wrote a thing about boats, and then I posted a giant thing about boats, and the siege vehicles were going to run into the ideas about boats. I don't remember if we've actually had that on at the DF Talk or not, talking about ...
Rainseeker:   Boats I'm not sure.
Toady:   The siege vehicles, like multi-tile things that can move around and so on.
Rainseeker:   Maybe talk a little bit about multi-tile stuff.
Toady:   A large issue there is turning; should you only be able to point in four directions, because it's kind of mathematically impossible to have more without breaking the grid system or breaking the relationships between grids and, or changing the number of grids, and you can't do any of those things really safely. Now even if the thing turns four directions it can still more in many more directions by doing kind of an up-up-over, up-up-over, up-up-over thing. So it's not like they'll be completely dissatisfying, it's just if you're trying to navigate a narrow thing that you'd normally be able to navigate, like a narrow channel that you'd normally be able to navigate a boat through but suddenly you have to corner and it's like, turn ninety degrees or whatever, then you might run into issues, or you make all the boats squares or something, I think that'd be pretty ugly though. But as far as covering it on a DF Talk we can always put it up for vote. Next month is taken by adventure mode, but after that it's up to ...

(...)

Toady: Yeah. The other problem that I was going to mention ... well one of the sub-problems I was going to mention for liquids was boats; boats are important once you get to fluids. Then you've almost got like a cave-in problem; does this multi-tile thing that you've built, perhaps tile by tile, and in whatever shape; does it float? And if so how deep does the boat float and how much of it shows above the surface of the water. It could do that, once it understands the boat as a multi-tile object that's not so hard to calculate, because you have the total mass of the boat and how many air tiles dip down at each level, those kind of things are pretty easily calculated, it would just be a known quantity for that boat and then you could stick it in the water. If you have some giant galleon or something you'd have a couple of tiles below the surface of the water and a couple of tiles above the surface of the water, and you can just walk around on it and stuff; it'd be really cool. The other fluid problem was multiple liquids. It doesn't seem so bad at first if I want to add a couple more liquid types like oil and I mentioned sand before. Sand, you want to be able to build on it or walk on it or whatever has its own problems, but even if you just consider other liquids like actual liquids, like oil and ... I'm not sure what else people have suggested, blood ... and giant alcohol silos.