Yes, convience and ignorance engineered into the same design. Welcome to Guzzi land. Yeah, spin on filter behinf the man-hole. Don't forget to pull any labeling taped onto the filter when you change it.
As for the forks, one contains only the valving needed for compression, the other only rebound. Thus the left fork provides all of the compression damping and the right provides all of the rebound. Several japanese makes used this style design to cut costs on their lower end bikes.
And the forks are connected, the front axle....