True, but you make it lean by fiddling with the handlebars. The interesting thing is that unless you’re doing tight maneuvers at parking-lot speeds, the movement of the bars is very subtle, difficult to perceive with your eyes. So you think of turning, you push/pull on the bars, they move just a smidge, and the bike readily leans over and starts carving a turn. In that sense, it can seem like rider and machine are one: you decide to turn, and without any visually obvious cues, the bike just starts leaning (contrast with a car, in which the movement of the steering wheel is obvious to all in the car).
Other aspects of connection with your motorcycle may or may not happen depending on the bike, any customization you’ve made, how much saddle time you have on it, and so on. And yes, going on long treks helps; cross-country treks with your bike as your closest companion for days on end are transformative in a way that afternoon cruises near home are not.
I used to have a bike like that, and I used to ride it like that. Custom saddle with backrest, barbacks, and a few other tweaks made it fit me perfectly, and after 130,000+ miles of riding it and wrenching on it I had grown intimately familiar with it. Took a trip from the upper Midwest to California, and several trips to the Rocky Mountains and the desert southwest. Track day. Saddlesore 1000. Every kind of weather, from “goddam it’s hot” to “WTF, it’s actually starting to snow.” I did feel that kind of unity; it was my horse. When I stopped somewhere for lunch, I’d sit where I could watch it - not for security reasons, but simply because I liked looking at it. And not just because it was pretty, but because looking at it brought up a ton of memories of all I had been through with it. For me, all of the scratches, dings and scars weren’t depreciation; they were a storybook, a historical record of all the adventures we had been on together.
I like my current bike - it’s more powerful, has cruise control and a heated seat and other things my old bike did not - but I have a much stronger emotional connection with my previous bike.