It is also interesting to imagine why the time was limited to 10 minutes only? Why not 1 hour or may 1 minutes? May be they had some other type of calculations in regards with the inelastic supply and timeline of the same. They could have brought it down and we would have seen all the bitcoins mined in may be 50 years or so. Must have been some thought or whether there is technical explanation to this as well?
New blocks are found ~ 10 minutes on average because it ensures the nodes, miners and the network are all on the same 'page', when miners confirm transactions and add them into a block, they propagate it to the whole of the network, if blocks are found for example 1 minute on average as you say, it would not give the miners enough time to know that the block they are competing for has already been mined and so they should start attempting to mine the next block, this will lead to chain splits and waste of computation power mining blocks that have already been mined.
It takes +9mins to 'mine a block'
It takes ~ 10 minutes
on average, but there is no certain time, it can be slower or faster than 10 minutes exactly, but on average it will be ~ 10 minutes.