Historical semantics like this always annoy me. By a strict definition of "revolution" it seems incorrect. There was no widespread social change as happened in France, and the political elite didn't change. The people in power in the States merely decided to leave the British empire, and won a war to legitimize the decision.
It's also known as the American War of Independence, at least partially for the reasons you mention.
Would calling it the 'War of Secession' not lead to confusion with the U.S. Civil War?
It was called a revolution before the French one was.
In the context of American history secession refers to a believed constitutional right to withdraw from the United States, this is quite different from the right of revolution which is an extralegal right. Moreover some historians have argued pretty convincingly, Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolutioncomes to mind, that America did experience a very radical revolution.
Its not really historical semantics, its more that words have a range of definitions that are not always precise or specific. IF you get too fussy about words then you'd need to either reexamine the name of every war for 'fixing' or end up in complex pedantic arguments for each new war.