This is the one thing I have missed terribly from Windows. It boggles my mind that Apple thinks all that clicking, rearranging windows, dragging, shifting, and dropping is a sane way to move files. Intuitive yes, but more painful than typing it out at a command line. Sometimes Apple gets stuck in "make it pretty" and forgets "make it useful".
1. You have to remember a new shortcut
2. If you forget and you paste with Cmd-V thinking that you did Cmd-X to cut, you end up copying the files, so you have to go back, re-select them, and delete them manually.
I just can't possibly understand _why_ they would explicitly think: "no, let's not use the standard user interaction here".
Apple's way puts a burden on the user of remembering a different menu item/key combo, but doesn't break the similarity of the cut/copy/paste interactions with those in the rest of the system. They've just chosen a different set of tradeoffs than Windows did for this engineering problem.
MS Office does not have a proper clipboard, either. For example, in Excel, open-select-cut-close-paste does not do what one expects:
- cut does not delete data from the clipboard, but sort-of marks it for a future move.
- close makes the app forget about that move, clearing the clipboard.
- because the clipboard is empty, paste does nothing.
IIRC, the clipboard is even broken within a single document, but I do not remember details (something like cut-enter data in a cell-select destination-paste?)
I'm actually not sure why anyone would defend the Apple way of doing this -- it's truly baffling. Windows has some terrible conventions and Apple has some terrible conversions -- we'd all be better off choosing the best of both then blindly defending one over the other.