But the 6502's "registers" are much smaller and you can do much less with them. You can't really sensibly compare the two approaches so superficially.

Can they really be called registers, when they're bytes in DRAM?

It really is just a convenient short addressing mode.

The 6502 has actual registers, A/X/Y and the specialized S/P/PC.

Yet the same number of register bytes (when only counting 6502's zero page)... 32x8 = 256 bytes...