I was only a little bit surprised when I learned recently that there were not a million stars visible in our night sky. One million is a huge number, and as small as stars are, I never believed there was nearly enough space in our sky for one million of them to be visible. However, my surprise came when I learned that only about 2000-2500 stars are visible at one time to a human being with good eyesight. The image above certainly seems to contradict this at first glance, but I haven’t taken the time to make sure it checks out. Because of images like the one attached I was certain that (while nowhere near a million) there were more stars in our night sky than the relative handful of 2000. So, if you had a way to check off each star you counted and not get mixed up, counting the stars in the sky at night would completely possible (albeit time consuming) feat.
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Vanderbilt Astronomy - The Solar System 
The fact that there are many (many!) more stars in the sky than can be seen with the unaided human eye is generally credited to Galileo in the early 1600s. Interestingly, it played a small part in dethrowning the ancient ideas that the Heavens were created specifically for the use and enjoyment of humans on Earth. Why, people could ask, are there more stars out there than the eye can see? If all the Heavens were created for us on Earth, why are there things there we cannot see? It was a small argument which could of course be countered by saying that God knew that humans would one day invent telescopes to see them, but a pretty lame argument at any rate. Along with the other arguments against the idea of a Universe created specifically for Earth and that everything was centered on Earth (also largely discovered by Galleo), the old ideas quickly died in scientific circles, although they remained popular with the public for some time.
You make a good point. In fact, there are billions of stars in the Milky Way’s disk which is visible in your image. However, touching on Larry’s point, the individual stars themselves cannot be resolved by the unaided human eye. Many stars are very faint and very far away, and on top of that our light buckets (eyes) are relatively teeny!