Points are a team-internal measure of a task. You can after the fact convert points to time, and then after a few sprints (when you have a fairly stable average velocity) then you can convert points to hours and do a forecast/estimation.
// In my mind you forecast the date of completion, but you estimate the amount of work. It's probably just mindless semantics, after all saying you can estimate the date of completion sounds just as natural, but saying you can forecast the amount of work sounds a bit unnatural.
It’s like points aren’t hours, but if I estimate (er, forecast) how many hours it will take, its pretty easy to turn that into points, and vice versa.
I suppose it’s like one of those, “There is no word for it in English, but it essentially means...”