The original Bitcoin didn't include any block limit and Bitcoin's inventor wasn't worried about block size being too large[0]. The current 1MB limit was itself a hard fork of the original as a temporary spam protection measure while the network was in it's infancy. So the name really isn't misleading. A lot of people are ignorant of the history of the block size limit though.

[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg099...