As much as I love emacs, I think cut and paste is better metaphor for text editing than kill and yank. Once the key combos are part of muscle memory, the value of mnemonics goes down, but they're very useful for adoption. This is an unfortunate barrier for emacs beginners. Even though the usual CUA keystrokes are available (and even the defaults on some popular starter configurations), the terminology creates some friction when reading the docs.

I agree the semantics are strictly superior though.

How do you do multiple pastes of one cut? My clipboard has history too, I can choose out of it.