Killed by a House Cat
I've noted my dislike of fragile player characters before. For me, I just don't have the time and patience to get that level of system mastery. Overall, I'm personally much more interested in learning how to develop an interesting story. However, I know lots of people out there love them. In episode 5 of the Girl on Guy podcast by Aisha Tyler, Zachary Levi (of Chuck fame) gives one of the best explanations of what he loves about them. The conversation starts at around the 54 minute mark. He really misses Ghost Recon because the fragility of the character (one shot could kill you) forced you to depend on your teammates and work on strategy. His description of his first time playing Ghost Recon is really awesome.
Now I admit, I think he's right. When characters don't die easily and when they don't have to go beyond themselves to get things done, it's hard to get the players to do anything other than fight. When they do fight, it's generally in an overly bold manner. In D&D, unless the entire party is built around stealthy characters, this usually means the fighter kicks open the door and someone says something along the lines of "Let's do this." Now, this can be a lot of fun, but after game 10 of the same style I know I'm left craving something a little more.
I don't think you need to weaken the characters to change this. One reason why weakened characters push people towards strategic play is because there is a consequence to the bold style of play. It's likely to get your character killed. But we could provide other consequences instead, hopefully aligned to the sensibilities and goals of the players and their characters.
That's the hard part though. While, weakened characters work across games, genres, and settings, rewards for thoughtful play vary wildly, require player buy-in, and rely on GM skill. How do provide these consequences without creating a railroad or making them too arbitrary? How do you get player buy in? How do you get new players into the game without making them feel like sidekicks or n00bs? Lots of games have their own solutions for these and related questions, everything from cooperative world building before or during the game like Dresden Files to the beliefs system in Burning Wheel. It's this area of game design and play that has my attention right now. I don't have any answers yet, just questions.
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Check out Everway, if you get the chance. It also forces the characters (who, granted, can turn out much larger-than-life) to have some pretty developed personalities before you start playing. Long out of print, alas, but a fan community still exists nonetheless.
I think how you handle this depends on what styles of play are overlapping.
If you want weak characters in a story heavy, combat light game, you're going to have weak characters who are trying to avoid combat and survive so they can pursue their destinies. It might not matter that a single bullet can kill a character, because a character who gets in a situation where any number of bullets are being shot at them is already at the Things Have Gone Terribly Awry stage anyway.
If you want weak characters in a story light, combat heavy game, then they're just bodies to be thrown at the meat grinder. While tactics will play a large role, dealing with the problem of bringing in a new character at the same power level is a much bigger issue than dealing with how to avoid fights.
Thinking about what kind of effect you want to achieve with weak characters - combat avoidance, tactical combat, character churn, etc - should be the basis for which mechanics you come up with to support it.
That's one of the things that I love about Legend of the Five Rings. Potentially, every hit is lethal and a samurai can die in a moment's notice. Hopefully it was at least honorable and glorious.
What I do is I make sure that my players know that they are in over their head. While a lot of encounters will be at their level, they know that my world isn't as clear-cut and any encounter can be WAY over their level. There are of course ways that they can figure it out (skill checks, hints, their instincts telling them it might be too much,...) but that generally means they have to scout and research. And while I won't stop them from trying to handle it anyway, I roll with it, even if it goes south. Up to know they've about ran as much as they somehow succeeded in handling the "hard" encounters, and gone down once (when they tried to fight it).
I am an old school D&D player. I played back when people rolled for random stats. One of the things I miss about random stats was it would make you try and find ways around over or through your weaknesses. Heroes could be handicapped from the start and that made for more interesting play at times.
Another way to look at this is the superman problem. The problem of the character of Superman in comics is that he is ultimately, the most powerful being on earth. Almost nothing hurts him. You have to give him a weakness or he gets boring. That was why they introduced Kryptonite in the first place.
The reason they got rid of random roles in D&D was one of game balance. On the surface, having a guy who has all high teens scores running around with someone who has only one good score is not work if you are trying to balance monsters to be even for both players. One way around that is Game Master influence. A game master would need to do more work, but a lot of the disparity in stats can be worked with.
I like systems where disads are a trade off. You want more power, you are somehow weakened in some other way. You get the superhuman strength, but you vulnerable to silver. Superhero systems have been doing things like that for a while now. I would recomend looking at Hero system and Mutants and Masterminds for some examples.
I seem to remember hearing back when it first came out that the Doctor Who RPG was deliberately lethal if you got into a combat because in the show combat never resolves anything. If you want to win, you have to be clever.
Currently our Traveller (MGT) game is going surprisingly well with the squishy characters. The combination of death being easy to achieve and there being no experience points means that the players have been less inclined to get involved in fights. Mostly they run away asap and sometimes we don't even have to roll for initiative ("We throw a couple of grenades, get in the air/raft and get the hell out of Dodge.")
My surprise is that the players have fallen in to this groove quite happily and we're concentrating on achieving their tasks in other ways. They are more used to the D&D way of advancing. We are dealing with rewarding them in monetary terms and they are combing sourcebooks for cool stuff to buy.
If however it wasn't going down well with the players it would be time to change things (and likely to a different game system).