It doesn't lower barriers to entry, it's contrary to logical expectations for someone unfamiliar with how BQ works. If the query is limited to 10 results you wouldn't expect it to scan all 2 trillion of your records. Granted there are numerous warnings in the GUI for these types of things but make this mistake in Python and you're none the wiser.
Wait are you saying the BQ db engine is not following logical expectations? You do realize a "limit" clause doesn't prevent a full table scan in all cases, right?