Why is the program counter a pointer and not a counter?

What will be an ideal response?

The term program counter has evolved historically but it is probably not the best choice for the register it labels.
The program counter contains the address of the next instruction to be executed in a stored program computer.
The program counter is a counter only in the sense that it is incremented after each instruction has been
executed. It should, of course, be called an instruction pointer, because it points at the location of the next
(machine?level) instruction to be executed.

The program counter may not necessarily be incremented after each instruction, as branching and jumping may
change the program counter to any arbitrary location.