Why we should stop considering hardware & software wallets as wallets. Smart Wallets are the real wallets.

I'm trying to have a discussion here about the terminology in Crytpos – especially in Ethereum space.

The term wallet is confusing because it refers to many different things, with very different way of working and different levels of security.

A Software wallet (SfW) – like Metamask – is just a keyring: it holds a key or a set of keys. It doesn’t hold funds – but rather the keys that give access to your funds. It's a software client used to keep your keys safe and interact with your wallet (where your funds are).

A Hardware wallet (HW) – like Ledger, Trezor or even Tangem – is also just a keyring. It is safer than a software wallet because the keys stay on a physical device and can't be accessed remotely.

But both of them are a single point of failure.

A Wallet – alone –is still a bit confusing because it may refer to 2 sligthly different things: – a public address, which actually holds your funds. – all public addresses derived from the same seedphrase.

But, either it is 1 address or several public addresses, the term "wallet" is well suited here (than in SfW and HW in my opinion) because it effectively stores your funds – like a real wallet stores your money bills.

A Smart wallet or Smart Contract Wallets (SCW) – like Safe Wallet – is a wallet because it does hold funds too (by Smart wallets, I'm talking about smart accounts based wallets).
It is called smart – which is not – because it is programmable and can have any features that make it incredibly more powerful and secure: multisig, social recovery, spending limits, access management, recurring payments, etc.

In a nutshell, SfW and HW are keys to access your Wallet – your Externally Owned Address address – or your SCW – a contract address that you own. So, rather than called SfW and HW "wallets", why not using a less confusing term like "keyring", "keyring client" or even "web3 client"?