There's no reason why there couldn't be multiple views of your history, if it's recorded with fidelity. The list of page views by time is often too noisy depending on what you are looking for, and the compacted view might be more useful. As you rightly point out, sometimes that page view log is what you want.

Really, the biggest use-case for browser history in its current form, seems to be to get people in trouble when nosy family members go peeking at it.