Regarding 1. Emacs does have keyboard macros. A bit more involved than just hitting dot, but they do let you compose an arbitrary sequence of operations (including selection) that can be repeated or saved and applied later.
it's the "a bit more involved" that makes it very weak in comparison. The power of the dot command is exactly that it takes one single keystroke to repeat the last action. You don't have to think in advance "I may want to repeat this action, let's add some keystrokes to store this in a macro." You don't have to push a few keys to repeat the action, just one single key.