You can build a beautiful boat by beveling the square-edged strips to get tight joints. The bead and cove certainly helps out with the aesthetic appearance of the canoe if it is going to be bright finished - particularly for those with limited experience. I find that for my students, who are all novice boat-builders and tend to be woodworkers of limited proficiency, the cove-and-bead helps to speed up the actual boat building process and give good cosmetic results at the same time. We show the students the other methods, however.
I've build boats by beveling square-edged planking to make the strips tighter and have heard others on the forum who just seem to strip the boats the best they can and fill the gaps later with thickened epoxy. Personally, I don't prefer this, but if you need to build a quick-and-dirty boat or will put on an opaque finish, I don't see an issue with it.
Ted Moores shows some other methods in his book, including a ship-lap planking method.
There are pitfalls to the cove-and-bead, however. It does take longer to mill the strips. (We speed things up with a dual router table assembly - both sides of the strip are cut at once - takes about 40 minutes to do ~1200 linear feet of strip stock) Strip thickness is critical (I should say minimum strip thickness - a little thicker just gives a little more thickness to fair off.) You could plane your stock before cove-and-beading, but we find the saw finish on our strips to be fine. Cutter sizes other than for 1/4" strip are not easy or inexpensive to find, so if you want to strip in 3/16" thickness, you may need to get creative. The edge of the cove side can be fragile so you need to handle and store strips with care. While milling stock, if you feed it too fast, these fine edges can chip out. Consistancy of the strips is important.