There are some ways to squeeze out the same ability for less points. It's inevitable with the way the rules work but they're all pretty obvious. (the Combat Reflexes advantage was intentionally under priced to encourage characters to take it, for example).
It will vary from campaign to campaign, as that will change what abilities the GM will let you take. But getting the ability to defend yourself is not difficult.Supplementary, how easy is it to create someone focused on social or mental aspects, but have decent secondary prowess in combat? Another problem we had in Scion is that our Mental character managed to create someone with minimal combat applications (neither command skills, nor combat skills, nor useful tricks, I realize that this is a build-fault and not a system fault per se, but I was curious how easy it was to say, create a "scientist" who is still half decent at defending herself.)
It depends on what those powers are. Two classic Brick superhero's slugging it out becomes a war of attrition. A skirmish between a group of adventurers and a band of orcs might be over in an instant if the adventurers take their enemies by surprise.With the myriad of immersion options that you're promoting as a good thing in GURPS, approximately how long does combat take, assuming battles between equivalent or near equivalent powers?
Characters have long list of skills because GURPS is a skill based game. Skills are the characters bread and butter.
You say it's easier to play than D&D because you don't need to have an absurd number of modifiers... but I've looked at character sheets, and they have a list of skills longer than my post up to this point. Not only that, but I can't see character creation being the only long point. From what you've said, a typical attack would be: "Pick a body part, attack, roll 3d6, roll for something to limit the opponent, opponent picks a type of way to not get hit and rolls against you, then you have a few more rolls if you get hit." That seems more complicated than D&Ds "Roll a d20. Huh, you beat his AC. He's hit."
Not only that, but with the sheer number of modifiers you listed that could be changed in a single action (a guy takes -4 on his attack skill to give the opponent a -2 to parry while attacking his arm which gives him some other negatives and may permanently disable the arm) is far more than D&Ds "Write your temporary modifier if you get a buff/debuff spell cast on you, and keep track of what your modifier is with just your normal gear."
Those extra combat options (take a penalty on attack to give enemy a penalty of defense, or feints, or move and attacks, etc) are best compared to the way D&D uses powers, or feats, or spells. It's no more complicated than D&D, and with everyone using the same set of abilities people learn the rules faster.
Mind you, GURPS combat is one of those things with lots of toggles. You can get rid of all the extra options but in my opinion that stops making it GURPS. (And will require a GM to understand how that effects the rest of the game).