Exactly. The problem is that, for some reason, people decided that an "API" should be "RESTful". Ruby on Rails put this idea into a lot of developers' heads.
An API is probably the worst thing to try to make truly RESTful, in the full HATEOAS sense.
Further confusion comes from the fact that some of the REST constraints are actually very useful in machine-to-machine API design. Thinking about a system in terms of a large number of resources operated on by a standard set of verbs is nice. Caching is nice. The un-bloating of HTTP bodies from the SOAP days is nice.
I think there is some consensus that we can call that thing an "HTTP API" rather than a "REST API", which might start to clear up some of the confusion.
An API is probably the worst thing to try to make truly RESTful, in the full HATEOAS sense.
Further confusion comes from the fact that some of the REST constraints are actually very useful in machine-to-machine API design. Thinking about a system in terms of a large number of resources operated on by a standard set of verbs is nice. Caching is nice. The un-bloating of HTTP bodies from the SOAP days is nice.
I think there is some consensus that we can call that thing an "HTTP API" rather than a "REST API", which might start to clear up some of the confusion.