I've always thought that Copy / Cut was a poor metaphor. The metaphors are so awful that I almost never used GUI filesystem manipulation until the mid-2000's, doing everything through the command line. I still usually use the command line.

Okay, I want to move files from point A to point B. What you're supposed to use is "cut" and "paste". If I use "cut" in a text editor, the text is gone until pasted. What if I do a "cut" on files? Are they deleted? Are they put in some super-invisible temporary trash bin? Or does the OS actually do nothing until you "paste" them? Do they have the same clipboard as copied text, or a different one? If you do a "cut" on files in folder A, followed by a "paste" in folder B, followed by another "paste" in folder C, what's the result? How do cut/copy interact with shortcuts, junction points, hardlinks, or symlinks? What are the subtle semantic incompatibilities in these metaphors across different versions of Windows, PC, Mac, Gnome, KDE, etc.?

Using the GUI is a crapshoot in terms of whether what actually happens will match my intent, and I'm an expert; I can scarcely imagine what a n00b's experience must feel like. You can do things much more precisely with command-line mv, cp or xcopy, find | xargs, or writing a simple Python script with os.walk(). About the only thing I use the GUI to do is select a large number of randomly distributed files from a directory.

"Trash" is also confusing, because things don't end up there consistently. If you cut things, they don't; if you delete them from the GUI they do. If you delete things from the command line, they don't. If the things are on a removable device, the Trash doesn't get them. If you delete things within an application, who knows what happens? It depends on whether the app is coded to use whatever API routes stuff to the Trash.