‘All right,’ said Sam, laughing with the rest. ‘But what about these Tree-men, these giants, as you might call them? They do say that one bigger than a tree was seen up away beyond the North Moors not long back.’

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Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings: One Volume (p. 44). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

‘All right,’ said Sam, laughing with the rest. ‘But what about these Tree-men, these giants, as you might call them? They do say that one bigger than a tree was seen up away beyond the North Moors not long back.’

'But what about these what do you call 'em - giants? They do say as one nigh as big as a tower or leastways a tree was seen up way beyond the North Moors not long back.'

... there's sufficient ambiguity to allow for both interpretations when it comes to how 'treeish' the Tree-men were?

A look at the draft text for the passage we're talking about makes for an interesting comparison. Here's the final cut again:

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And here's the first draft:

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A second draft then introduced the 'Tree-Men', which stuck for the final cut. However, in the original conception, Sam was explicitly talking about a 'giant', who was at least as big as a tree - with nothing specifically 'treeish' about the creature in question. The reference to a tree can be read as a comparator, nothing more - identical in function to the reference to a tower (Tower-man, anyone...?). But the second draft and final version introduce the creature as a 'Tree-man' and a giant, bigger even than a tree. The comparator element is still present but the creature is called a Tree-man first and who also happens to be bigger than a tree. Tolkien has shifted from relative clarity (it's a giant) to ambiguity (it's a Tree-man and a giant). As the passage went through two drafts before settling down to the final version, I can't help but reckon that the ambiguity is deliberate or embraced as such during the creative process. Semantics, arguably. But just as arguably the source of sufficient ambiguity to entertain the idea that we have something Entish going on here, once the concept of Ents er, took root. As put much more efficiently by Ethel earlier.

Final random remarks. Giants appear elsewhere in the legendarium, notably in The Hobbit - the 'stone-giants'. Digging around in other ancient drafting history, within The Book of Lost Tales I, we have references to 'wood-giants' and 'mountainous giants'. And to not at all complete this multilayered picture, we have CJRT's observation in the aforementioned HoMe VI, that ent is the Old English word for 'giant', which Tolkien was deploying well before he got to Fangorn - for example in an early geographical name for what later became the Ettenmoors. What to make of all this? Apart from the stratigraphical joy I always take from perusing decades of drafts, it seems clear enough to me that Tolkien had been playing with giants and associations with different kinds of 'substance' for some time (wood, stone), so that by the time we get to what was published in The Fellowship of the Ring, a 'Tree-man' is eminently interpretable as Entish or a giant or both!

'[Hal] works for Mr. Boffin at Overhill and goes up to the Northfarthing for the hunting. He saw one.'

'Says he did, perhaps. Your Hal's always saying that he's seen things; and maybe he sees things that ain't there.'

'But this one was a big as an elm tree, and walking--walking seven yards to a stride, if it was an inch.'

'Then it wasn't an inch. What he saw was an elm tree, as like as not.'

'But this one was walking, I tell you; and there ain't no elm trees on the North Moors.'

I reach not for Occam's razor but rather... Flash Gordon's strigil ;)

Through using this wonderful tool, we can see clearly that the Tree Men of Arboria look like men but that Hawk Men look like men with hawk wings.

Given that Flash Gordon stormed across comic strips through the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Tolkien would have had plenty of opportunity to avail himself of the strigil while writing LotR.