Fair question! Windows does it pretty much the same way under the hood: the file is not affected until you paste it in the new location. If you never complete the paste, the cut command does nothing. The difference is the interaction maps to another, better-known one that is much easier to discover if you've used a text editor or word processor. I recall the default Ubuntu file manager working the same way, but I don't have an installation running at the moment.

On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.