The format was named for the file, not the file for the format. By the time this became incongruous, it was too late to fix.

gcc copied most of its command-line arguments from older compilers, including -o, and the default value if -o isn't set was also copied.

So the command-line arguments and defaults are older than the ELF format. When ELF support was added, the question was: Should the default value for -o depend on other arguments? There didn't seem to be good reason to have a complicated default, and keeping the simple default provided compatibility with old scripts and makefiles.

cd tests ; for a in *.c ; do gcc $a && ./a.out ; done