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Gas is its own unit, decoupled from ETH. Opcodes cost a certain amount of gas to execute [1]. When creating a transaction, a sender sets the maximum amount of gas that they are willing to pay. This is the "gas limit."

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m89CVujrQe5LAFJ8-YAU...

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I know what gas is. It would be more accurate to call it a unitless number describing the relative resource cost factor of each opcode.

If you define the term gas as a unit then it refers to both a value, and the unit of that value, which is where most of the confusion comes from. The language "1000 gas" could mean either "1000 wei/szabo/whatever of gas" or "1000 gasCost" which are 2 completely different things!

"This book is five dollars" vs.

"The price of this book is five dollars" vs.

"This is five dollars" (meaning "this book's price is") vs.

"This is five dollars" (meaning "five dollars are sitting here on the table.")

I know what you're saying, there is ambiguity, but these make sense to people based on context.

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