How We State a Number
The same number, twice.
Two parts can publish the same figure and mean different things by it. One figure was taken with the signal already through the board, the connector and the cable. The other was taken at the pin, before any of that happened. Both are honest measurements. One of the two tells you what will happen in your system, and datasheets do not always say which one you are reading.
A receiver can be characterized after the cable, because by the time the signal reaches the device it has already made the trip. So a receiver figure here is stated after the cable — the cable length the equipment uses, not the span the interface specification assumes. That is the harder number to publish, and it is the one a system designer can actually use.
A transmitter cannot do this, and we do not pretend otherwise. What leaves the output pin is ours. What arrives at the far end depends on a board, a connector and a cable we did not design and cannot see. So a transmitter figure here is stated at the device output, and we say so in the table and the body, not in a footnote alone. Publishing a far-end number would mean guaranteeing a layout we did not design.
A part that has not finished characterization has its figures labeled as design targets, not measurements, and they stay labeled that way until the work is done. When the measurements exist, we publish them together with the conditions they hold under.