Welcome to the dark side :) Here's a thread that might help you. And a video on action centers. About the hotkeys, make sure in the Input Editor that Context is set to (contextless) or Component Mode. I think Inset might be tool.set poly.inset on EDIT: Here's another post from a while back that might be of interest to you.
im making the switch from 3ds to modo 501 (student license ran out :poly117:) i picked this up in a couple of hours, most of which was questioning why action centres existed. some bits remind me of maya ! anyway i tried the input thing and tried mapping 'poly.inset' to a key . thats the command thats called but it no work…