Is the 'Remote' In 'Remote Procedural Call' something of a misnomer?

Question

My understanding of an RPC is that Bitcoin-qt (client) will send an RPC to bitcoind (or an instance of bitcoind on another machine if the configuration settings are changed to make that happen) and then bitcoind will respond to the RPC with either the requested information, or an error. So in this instance 'remote' refers to the remoteness between bitcoin-qt and bitcoind and not 'remote' in the following, more frequent use of the word.

Generally in computer science, something 'remote' or 'remote access' refers to another machine, whereas, the vast majority of the time(right?), bitcoin-qt and bitcoind are on the same machine.

Answer 1

Bitcoin-qt does not interact with bitcoind at all. Bitcoin-qt is a full node by itself, entirely stand-alone.

There is a tool shipped with Bitcoin Core called bitcoin-cli which allows RPC commands to be issued.

You can certainly interact with your Bitcoin Core node from another machine via the RPC (remote).

Answer 2

As with any other RPC, of course the RPC client can run on a different machine than the RPC server.

As such, that happens with bitcoin-cli and bitcoind.

Your confusion simply arises from the historic accident that the Bitcoin Core GUI currently accesses the local bitcoin node using an inner procedure call interface instead of a remote procedure call interface.