The cells being the same shape is useful in some use cases and irrelevant in others. For example, see the Airbnb demo: https://a5geo.org/examples/airbnb. The H3 tiles are very different sizes in the two cities, and make it appear that there is a much higher density of listings in Malta, even though that is not the case.

However the symmetry of H3’s hexagonal cells lends itself well to flow analysis, or routing - which is no surprise as it was developed at Uber.

As for the name, it follows the convention of S2 and H3, which come from group theory and refer (loosely) to the symmetry groups of the various systems