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So...I now have double the coins, but separated onto two chains?

You have the same number of coins, and will continue to until the point that a block is mined on the XT chain that would not be accepted by Core clients. The absolute earliest that could possibly happen is January 25 (Jan 11 activation date + 2 week grace period). But that 2wk grace period only actually activates after 75% of the hashing power globally moves to XT. So at the time XT actually forks, users will have had plenty of notice.

Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.

I mean, the coins I hold now (or whatever the fork date is) can be spent on both the XT chain and the Core chain.

I may be wrong here but assuming you're broadcasting to both networks, your transaction is valid in both XT and Core so they'd both try to add it to a block.

The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.

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