I actually felt pretty safe walking around with a significantly larger amount than that in chips at the WSOP circuit events over the weekend in Vegas.

I lived in Vegas for a while and people walked around with chips all the time. Of course when I was at Intel I once had to carry six tubes of 80386 chips (A0 stepping) from manufacturing over to the design engineering guys. (it hadn't been released yet) and the stupid marketroid had to mention that there was probably a million dollars of black market silicon there. I wasn't nervous before starting out but was after that comment! Its all in one's state of mind.

Are you talking about tournament chips? It's completely invalid to compare them to poker chips that can be used in cash games or to actual cash.

No; cash chips. I wouldn't even consider the equity your share of chips in a tournament represents as 'cash' in any real sense (until you cash in the tournament at least)

Supposedly he had it for only a couple of hours, just to take pictures.