Self built ships and gates built by mysterious high tech aliens is more common, but you can have it the other way round as well.
Star Gate gates do not seem to be designed to be used by vehicles, but other gate builders could have different design goals. SG gates can be moved easily however, so they are a potential vehicle component. A vehicle that can transport a gate and move through it after some reconfiguration would be in principle possible. Not particulary nice, because it means that if you arrive somewhere you take away the local gate on your expedition and leave it lying around whereever you decided to come back, but you can prevent being cut off from the gate that way.
If the gates are not round, you propably could send gates through each other.
It is possible that mass or volume or a length speed ratio become design considerations. More mass, volume or a longer operation might mean more energy use or more wear and tear on the gate.
If you don't stick to SG, gates that do not function on planets are a possiblity too.
There are a couple of reasons to put installations on not habitable planets, even if you have habitable ones. They might have a resource you need (even if the resource is just "it's really hot there"). You want to avoid or reduce contamination by biological influences. Security reasons, if anything living on that planet is automatically suspicious, it's harder to creep up on your installation and this makes a good place for a high security prison.
It also is possible, that the gate builders are still there, keep their technology secret, but allow others some form of access to the gates. The quadrail series by Timothy Zahn has a setup like this, though technically there are no gates.
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