[ra7]

In my local coffee shop, I get black tea with steamed milk (called chai tea).

They also sell masala chai, which is the above + spices added.

Starbucks uses chai tea and chai tea latte to mean something else.

Some grocery stores (Trader Joe's?) sell chai as just a spice mix.

So Americans aren't really using it "differently" as much as they're using it wildly inconsistently. That's not really the same as cappuccino vs latte, is it? Latte is at least used to mean the same thing across the country.