Just one warning on subsurface stuff: when it breaks, it's not pretty to fix. I've got this in some parts of my garden and it's just far too easy to stick a shovel right through the water line. Even a small puncture requires repair or else you'll have water leaking out of the hole. You'll get very little, if any, water downstream of a puncture. Unless you know where you damaged the pipe (and you often don't), you've got to basically dig the whole line up and look for the hole. Then, most likely, you cut out the broken part and patch it with a solid piece that has two male connectors on each side.

There are two main variants on leaky pipes: soft things, like garden hoses, that have lots of tiny holes everywhere, and harder things that have holes spaced out every few inches. The harder pipes are probably more resistant to damage, but the root systems of plants can grow straight through the holes and start clogging your pipe. The solution, I understand, is to wrap the pipes in some sort of fabric that lets water through but not plants. Uggh.

For contrast, a traditional pop-up sprinkler system had hard PVC pipes, so the only thing you have to really worry about is damage to the sprinkler heads. (Or, in my own garden, it's the damn heads getting dirt and crap in them that requires you to disassemble and clean out the individual heads.)

There must be a better solution, somewhere, but I don't know what that might be.