Yeah, I like car/cdr very much and use them where appropiate because of semantics. Indeed, car/cdr doesn't mean the same as first/rest or head/tail. E.g. head/tail makes sense only if you're talking about lists. But cons-cells can be used to compose different types of data structures.

As funny as it is, people whining about "car/cdr" and saying "language X did it better because it called them first/last, or head/tail" don't realize that it's the language X that lacks semantics to express anything else than lists using cons cells.