At least the scale gives you an idea even if not as immediately intuitive as you would like. In model railway world you have O, HO, OO, N and plenty of other scales that sometimes are not even a scale - track guages can be different in scale to the trains.

1:60 is the convention for planes which is not the same as the 1:64 scale used for die cast toy cars. But these are the standards we are stuck with. Well it is convention for planes to be in 1:60 scale