But, again, this isn't really cut and paste at all. It's more like "note position, and _then_ atomically cut and paste". Cutting and pasting files in Windows doesn't work at all like cutting and pasting anything else.

Someone who had never used Windows might reasonably expect, on finding 'cutting' a file did something, that if they never pasted the file would just be deleted, because that's how cut and past normally works.