It’s part of an evolution.
Originally, Python items() built a real list of tuples and returned that. That could potentially take a lot of extra memory.
Then, generators were introduced to the language in general, and that method was reimplemented as an iterator-generator method named iteritems(). The original remains for backwards compatibility.
One of Python 3’s changes is that items() now return views, and a list is never fully built. The iteritems() method is also gone, since items() in Python 3 works like viewitems() in Python 2.7.