Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on mostly highway riding, without a significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike.
So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650 or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks, will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at 30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about 25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on the fairing.
You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half-way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and think you're doing well, building false confidence.
Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography to a huge degree.
I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France, Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat; northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state).
(I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)