Well, I wouldn't even bring it up, because the UTF-8 decoding process by definition cannot produce code points in the surrogate pair range, as those are illegal

Well, I wouldn't even bring it up, because the UTF-8 decoding process by definition cannot produce code points in the surrogate pair range, as those are illegal to encode in UTF-8. But if I must, I might talk about the "bit pattern" and the integral value that results from interpreting it. I certainly wouldn't talk about code points resulting from a UTF-8 decode.