A mouse can also be considered a pointing device. But it’s not the technology we’re talking about here; we’re talking about how we communicate and interact with computers through their graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
The term point-and-click fundamentally means choosing an item on the screen by “pointing” to it with a cursor, then pressing a button or key that is labeled as being “clickable.” A clickable item on a GUI is called an “active area,” which is just another word for “hotspot.” In modern UIs there is usually more than one active area because it would be too frustrating if users supported only one triple-click sequence after activating an interactive widget.