Python ElementTree: ElementTree vs root Element

I'm a bit confused by some of the design decisions in the Python ElementTree API - they seem kind of arbitrary, so I'd like some clarification to see if these decisions have some logic behind them, or if they're just more or less ad hoc. So, generally there are two ways you might want to generate an ElementTree - one is via some kind of source stream, like a file, or other I/O stream. This is achieved via the parse() function, or the ElementTree.parse() class method. Another way is to load the XML directly from a string object. This can be done via the fromstring() function. Okay, great. Now, I would think these functions would basically be identical in terms of what they return - the difference between the two of them is basically the source of input (one takes a file or stream object, the other takes a plain string.) Except for some reason the parse() function returns an ElementTree object, but the fromstring() function returns an Element object. The difference is basically that the Element object is the root element of an XML tree, whereas the ElementTree object is sort of a "wrapper" around the root element, which provides some extra features. You can always get the root element from an ElementTree object by calling getroot(). Still, I'm confused why we have this distinction. Why does fromstring() return a root element directly, but parse() returns an ElementTree object? Is there some logic behind this distinction?