I can assure you, it's a much much better situation than three hours of active labor followed by an unplanned or worse, emergency, c-section. Consider yourself fortunate. Labor isn't just painful, it's trauma which makes surgery much more risky and difficult to recover from.

> Of course, the process of going through labor pains for many hours might make things even between the two...

It's not. Labor pain is more time limited and the mother is kind of "out of it", and doesn't usually remember it clearly - plus there's a prize at the end :)

C-section pain is worse, and it lasts several weeks exactly at a time when the mother needs to do stuff. It's worse in every way.