Serious question, are Emacs users seriously in the habbit of typing things like M-x some-long-command-with-minuses? In Vim to go to a line number it's just colon line number, e.g. ":34" goes to line 34. I mean that's the default, not something that's been keymapped. Or do you guys end up keymapping things like that frequently aswell? Then again you guys don't have modal editing so I can see why it's always M-x before doing something non-edity, so it might seem assbackwards for a Vim user :)

I take for instance the most common commands I use in Vim to edit with that I use 95% of the day and they're rarely more than a single character or 3 at the most.

If it's a command we start to use often we bind it to a shortcut (If I may presume to speak for emacs users). It's not much different than shell commands. Some you just type, some you create an alias/function shortcut for.

I recently discovered an emacs package that lets me type M-x and then the first letter or two of a command that I used recently and it completes it for me from there (smex.el). That's even easier than coming up with a new keybinding.

Just to try and help you understand how emacs users see it, your most common vim commands that are a single character are actually sometimes a single character and sometimes they need to be prefixed by an ESC to get you into the right mode. That inconsistency is what killed me when I tried to use vim. In emacs every command is always the same, no need to keep track of what mode I'm in.