The Mac version is the “native version”. For Word, anyway, which Microsoft made for the Mac first (since all they had was DOS at the time). 
For slideshows and image management, I much prefer QPict. Been using it for years!
I suspect that it has to do with “cut” and “paste” being considered data-level actions, not file-level actions. The two terms were taken from the pre-computer page layout practice of physically cutting out the different page elements and then physically pasting them into the appropriate location on a template. Using “cut” and “paste” to move files is incongruous within that context; moving actual physical files from one folder to another in the physical realm is not a matter of cutting and pasting; you don’t “cut” a folder from one file cabinet and “paste” it into another, you remove it from one and place it in the other. On a Mac, terms like these have one specific meaning. Windows confuses matter by using the same term to refer to two (or more) different and unrelated actions.
Then there is the two different user interface paradigms:
Early versions of windows carried over many conventions from DOS, one of which was the “tree” analogy for the folder hierarchy. In other words, to get to a particular directory, the user had to burrow down to it from the top level. This is what people who had used DOS were accustomed to, so doing it that way in Windows made a certain amount of sense. However, it didn’t make it intuitive, in the new graphical environment, to move files from one directory to another. So being able to “cut” and “paste” actual files was kind of a workaround for the fact that when you’re looking at the “tree” it was awkward to have two different directories open at the same time, especially when they were far enough apart on the list that both could not be displayed at the same time (I’m relying on my vague memories of Windows 3.1 from many years ago; in the interest of “backward compatability” most of these things were carried over into future version of Windows even though they were no longer strictly necessary).
On the Mac, the default from the very beginning (I believe) was that the user could open two folders into two separate windows at the same time, even if those folders resided on different levels of the directory hierarchy. Moving files from one folder to another was a simple matter of opening both folders and dragging the desired files from one window to the other. Perhaps this was possible in early versions of Windows, but it probably wasn’t the first thing a veteran DOS user would think of, so other methods were devised. The idea of “cutting” a file is foreign to Mac users.
I see you’ve already said much of what I said, but with regard to this statement, I’ll just say “see my answer above”. Mac OS retains (or attempts to, anyway) the “desktop analogy”, wherein items on your computer desktop have analogs in the physical world. You can certainly photocopy a physical document and then place the copy into a different folder, but you still don’t “cut” the original document from it’s original folder. That still leaves “paste”, which doesn’t make sense in the desktop analogy when speaking of entire files. In this case, I think Apple would be better off implementing the “Move…” action that Windows has, because it adheres better to the desktop analogy.
