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My experience over the last 30 years of riding big 4 cylinder street bikes borrowed from friends is that they usually have such broad power bands and amounts of torque that they'd be just fine for street riding if they came with 4 speed gearboxes instead of 5 or 6 speeds. For real world riding (not the race track) a bike that can do 0-70 in first gear with an honest 7-9000 RPM power band really doesn't need another 5 gears to row through. Some friends of mine who had GS1100/1150 Suzukis put on sprockets with about 3-4 less teeth, and even then it was easy to start off in first, skip over second to third, and then skip up to top gear and just leave it there.
Riding a narrow power band 125 with a lot of gears and trying to keep it on the pipe can be great fun -- for a while. For day to day use a bigger engine with a wide and friendly power band is much more pleasant.
cheers,
Michael
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