My previous posts in this thread were attacked quite a lot. My posting time is limited, so I don't have the time to respond to each attack directly, but I did wonder why no-one actually bothered to respond to the main statement in my post. My main statement was that the new embarkation rules might allow civilizations to cross bodies of water without any previous planning or any previous hammer investment. With this statement, I wasn't being all-negative or assuming that the designers were morons. I was just describing a fairly logical result of the embarkation rule. Of course there might be additional rules that make planning fairly necessary. I even mentioned a possible one directly following this statement: a shipping pool which must be constructed before you can transform units into ships. This idea is similar to the transport ships used for colonists in Orion II if anyone remembers that game.
I wouldn't like it if bodies of water could be crossed without previous planning because that would remove one layer of planning and would make water a less significant barrier to movement. The main attraction of civ to me is strategy, tactics and planning, so it would be a negative point for civ5. While it could be compensated by other positives, it would still remain a negative.
By the way, I do like a lot of other stuff which I read about the military aspects of civilization V (more tactical battles due to 1UPT + ranged attack + terrain which can't be crossed, hexes, higher movement per turn, interdiction, less roads). But I like to take a more balanced approach to a new game and not assume that everything will be perfect. I can't say that this was ever true in any previous game which I played, although the civ games were all great in their own way.
PieceofMind: I also immediately thought that the embarkation rule was motivated in large part by the AI problems with amphibious transportation and I agree that it's a good idea to help the AI this way.
Allow me to speculate...
From the available screenshots, it's looking like there will again be at least two different levels of water depth which to me suggests that early in the tech tree, once sailing and embarkation become possible, it will only be possible to navigate coastal tiles by water. This might allow land units to get around a peak or something but I don't think it will so much allow them to cross "bodies of water" unless those bodies of water are coastal and just separating something like an island.
We already have at least one screenshot where supposedly we see an archer firing over a lake. This suggests the scale they're striving for is such that a single tile or two of water should not be viewed as a massive body of water larger than maybe a few tens of kilometres. I view this as being like movement between islands which even primitive tribal groups achieved without much resource investment.
Crossing larger bodies of water (beyond just coast tile) I would assume would take a later tech (like Astronomy in Civ4). After this point, it might indeed be possible to move massive armies across larger bodies of water with little to no planning or investment before hand and I'd imagine this is where your concerns will be mainly directed, Roland. However, one as to ask what advantages there are to up and moving a massive army across water? For starters, I think it's safe to assume that any unit once it enters the water and becomes a (civilian?) transport will be very vulnerable to attack so if you're planning a naval invasion it will take an investment in military naval units before that becomes feasible. I'm assuming the devs have the nous to have AIs build up at least some naval military units if they have any significant part of their empire on the coast and guard their important assets with nearby ships.
In my view, investment in the tech tree and sufficient naval protection for any water-body-crossing journey will be the two main investments required for these things. I don't see a big problem with the removal of the requirement to build specialised unit transports. It can be relegated to another layer of abstraction just as units moving over railroads and roads don't have wheels. However I appreciate that in reality building a transport ship is not on the same scale as building a wheeled cart. For this reason I think there will be some momentary penalty for embarkation actions. For example, maybe units will suffer a landing penalty on the turn they disembark. This will make amphibious invasions risky if you don't have convincing numbers, just as it has always been.
Overall, I think it may be true the designers are doing away with the idea of bodies of waters being "barriers" as you describe them. Instead they are becoming more like just a different type of terrain. This should have the advantage of making the naval game more interesting IMO.
And the more I think about it, if you want to bring realism into it, I don't see how it can be argued that travelling along coast has classically been a bigger barrier than say, travelling across harsh deserts or rugged mountain ranges.
If you can think of absurd yet simple consequences of a postulated game mechanic, chances are that's not how that mechanic will work, ok? 
. It's just a matter of preference. I just prefer to see the ocean represented as the barrier it is. Otherwise, it's just blue land tiles which slow movement once you enter them. And that mechanic of slowing movement upon embarkation (which comes from this discussion, not from an article) wouldn't even work well for coastal transportation as that was historically a fast and efficient way of transport.