No; just that like BMWs, they have longitudinal crankshafts
...and shaft drive. An addition to your "That's every BMW ever, then", turning it into "That's every BMW, Moto Guzzi, and Gold Wing ever, and that old Indian and the big new Triumph too, then". (Well, every BMW ever except for the somewhat newish single-cylinder off-roaders, F65 or whateverthefuck they're called, and the two- or three-year-old K1200S [or some such], which all have transverse crankshafts and chain drive. And I'm not sure about early Pleistocene Guzzis either.)
And "how it works", BTW, is not anything as esoteric as gyroscopic effects, but just the simple force-counterforce principle: Any engine, if the crankshaft were braked by some force, that would tend to apply a rotational torque in the opposite direction to the rest of the engine. Think Superman flying up and grabbing hold of the propeller of a Spitfire: The plane would start twisting around its long axis at some 2000 rpm. Or think helicopters: That's why most single-rotor ones have that boom with a little propeller at the back, to apply a counter-counter-twist to the counter-twist that the engine driving the main rotor is applying to the whole airframe.
HTH!
