Java Streams apply to Collections, which is a broader abstraction than a list.

"A list comprehension is a syntactic construct available in some programming languages for creating a list based on existing lists." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_comprehension)

Stream's terminal operations contains much more options than just "creating a list".

> or are Java 'streams' infinite?

They are in toy examples.

I don't follow your original point 100%, but I will say that 90% of the time when I use Streams, I'm really just wishing List had map and filter, etc.