This seems to be how Qt4 is.  It's a great API to work with, but unfortunately results in 50-call-deep stacks (not an exaggeration -- I have to set valgrind to --num-callers=50 to get reasonable stack traces) and a lot of latency.  That plus bugs in the new QGraphicsScene API are making me consider switching to something lower level, like Clutter or my old friend OpenGL.