I think no matter what you do here, you have a problem. When you press ctrl-x on a file in Windows explorer; you're not really cutting it; nothing happens til you paste! (Unlike using cut anywhere else).
Both Windows and MacOS end up with a bit of a strained metaphor here; I don't think it's at all obvious which way is _correct_.
From a UX perspective the answer is pretty clear. Copy/Cut/Paste is the winning paradigm, which empirically makes it the correct way.
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.
Furthermore, you can cut once and paste to several places, with predictable semantics identical to every other implementation of cut+paste (though performance of the first paste will be different from subsequent ones).
Edit: I was entirely wrong about the second part, which does undermine my point considerably.