It's a request for the other person to pull, it's only a push if the requestor is doing the action (and they're not).

So... technically no. It really is a "pull" request from Github's perspective. A PR is (1) a bunch of review/comment/history/hook tracking in the web/cloud backends and (2) a single git branch name somewhere else on github, writable by the author, which contains the changes.

The underlying action of merging a "pull request" is to pull from the submitted branch to the target branch. It's no different than Linus doing it from a maintainer branch.