So cout is what makes whatever you type pop up on your screen aka "the output" ?

Answer 1

Basically, yes. It's standart output, mostly some console on your screen.

Answer 2

Yes, for C languages

Answer 3

As you will hopefully learn later, cout is an object that has a lot of things going on behind implementation; for example, taking your character data and passing it off (by an address in memory) to the default output object managed by your OS I/O stream (hence <iosteream>).