I've only been to the UK once, but I don't remember fries being called "chips" in UK McDonalds.
I've always thought of "fries" as those skinny things McDonalds/Hungry Jacks/Burger King sell, while chips are the chunkier version you get at a proper Fish'n'Chip shops or pub. Restaurants here (Australia) generally distinguish between the two.
As somebody in the UK I'd have to agree french-fried and chips are different things. One is reconstituted potatoe's into small thin like eddibles of a uniform small size and chips are cut potatoes into chunkier like bits.
Where I live, the fried potato-variant in the image is the same thing as fries - we don't distinguish between our variants. We might go as far as calling them thick fries, but that's about it.
It does seem really stupid though. Are you going to go to a fish-and-chips shop, ask for "chips but no fish", get told that they're not allowed to sell that, and then say "OK, we'll go to McDonald's instead"? That's never going to happen!
I've always thought of "fries" as those skinny things McDonalds/Hungry Jacks/Burger King sell, while chips are the chunkier version you get at a proper Fish'n'Chip shops or pub. Restaurants here (Australia) generally distinguish between the two.