The bulldozer at the top pushing dead dwarves off the side is a perennial favorite, as are the spikes and things at the bottom where the other dwarf has apparently just thrown himself off.
That said - Once you get past the initial hurdle, Dwarf Fortress is a barrel of laughs. It seriously is exactly like the picture: there's this enormous terrifying cliff at the beginning, but once you've understood the initial "cluster" of concepts (how to do an embark that doesn't completely suck, how to dig, how to get reliable food and booze, how to defend against goblins) it's a pretty open game and there are only a couple of things after that point that will summarily slaughter your fortress, many of which are your own stupid fault anyway. Heh heh heh.
If you're just starting out, download the latest version of DF (0.31.25 as of this writing). It has a couple of rather crippling 0.31.19 bugs fixed (specifically, traps are no longer gimped to hell). Also download Dwarf Therapist from http://code.google.com/p/dwarftherapist/. It says it's only good up to 0.31.21 but if it encounters a version it doesn't know about, it tries to download a new memory layout file, which is currently working fine. Dwarf Therapist makes the game playable. WE ARE NOT KIDDING HERE. The sole purpose of Dwarf Therapist is to give you an overview of what labors your dwarves have turned on, so you can quickly identify e.g. your new immigrants have completely illogical labors turned on. It also serves as a check to make sure e.g. legendarily skilled dwarves actually have their legendary skill turned on, and aren't doing stupid things like going outside to pick flowers. For some reason the Toady One hasn't gotten around to making a usable UI for labor allocation yet, so Dwarf Therapist is really essential.
You WILL lose your first fortress, probably to a lack of booze. You WILL lose your second fortress, probably to a lack of booze or food, or an excess of goblins or water. You WILL lose your third fortress, probably to an excess of goblins (you've figured out food and booze by now). You WILL lose your fourth fortress, probably to an uninvited guest of some sort. You will MOST LIKELY lose your fifth fortress, usually to a particularly hostile uninvited guest or an extreme excess of goblins. You will MOST LIKELY lose your sixth fortress, to one of a number of causes such as shortage of booze (yeah you forgot to make sure your booze industry was still working), excessive justice, excessive water, excessive lava, uninvited guests, elite goblin siege, !!monarch butterflies!!, &c.
If you don't like the sound of the preceding paragraph, Dwarf Fortress might not be for you. If you think it's funny to watch your dwarves die because they walked around in magma and their feet burned off, while their lungs are rotting away because they breathed a breath weapon that causes instant severe necrosis on inhalation, then Dwarf Fortress is the game you were always looking for!
But you shouldn't feel frightened that you need to spend a month figuring out how to play before you can start having fun. This is absolutely not true. As long as you can find fun in watching your dwarves get slaughtered by goblins, or emo your entire fortress to death because they're out of booze, or get flattened because you accidentally dug out an entire layer of a hill and dropped the top half 5 ft onto the bottom half, you really don't need to know much of anything to play.
The wiki has a number of starting guides to give you a leg up on getting started. Basically the most important things for a starting fortress to secure are 1) booze, 2) shelter, 3) food. By the time you get to your 3rd or 4th fortress it's important to know the exact behavior of each digging designation, but probably not until then. Just sort of, fire it up, go ahead and "Play Now!" (although you won't want to do this after your first try because it gives you VERY messed up starting skills), and just do some stuff!