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Why does Vimes being short seem to come as a surprise to some people?

Remember that not only is he called Vetinari's Terrier (terriers tend to be small dogs), but in The Fifth Elephant, Vimes initially fails to recognize the irony during a rant in which he mentions "Eight-stone" (112 lb. or 50.8 kg) fighters and uses the term "bantamweight". Even if his genetics would have allowed him to be taller, his background does not support the idea of him being anything but short.

Sam Vimes grew up not just in the Shades, but on Cockbill Street, a place where people couldn't afford to eat regularly. He and his mother probably faced hunger more frequently than some of their neighbors (though perhaps not as frequently as larger families) because Mrs. Vimes wouldn't accept money that was made immorally and because she was a single mother who didn't have the income of a husband to help cover expenses.

Consider how, in Night Watch, Vimes (as Keel) was shocked to see how skinny his younger self was, and that his younger self said that he joined the watch because a friend had told him that there was free food, a uniform, and that he could occasionally make an extra dollar. This shows a surprising difference between adult and young Vimes: with his adult and soon-to-be-father self being taken aback by the sorry sight of himself as a kid as well as his younger self openly and readily talking to a near stranger about how, at 17 years old, he's just now starting to get a sense of food security. Furthermore, in Guards!Guards!, it is stated that "He couldn't help remembering how much he'd wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they'd been starving - anything with meat on it would have done", which shows the extent of the hunger he faced in his youth.

Sam Vimes isn't someone of an average height that seems short simply because he spends so much time around tall people (such as Carrot, Sybil, and Vetinari), he is short. Vimes grew up without access to healthy or adequate quantities of food, therefore his growth was stunted by malnourishment, which likely means that he would be below the average height of a human citizen of Ankh-Morpork.