>If you think about it this behavior was a kind of 'buffer' of sorts. I've had several times over the years where a 'deleted' record was able to be recovered after being inadvertabtly deleted.

Agreed - I count the purely logical deletion we have as a real blessing, and for the most part, we keep them as an "audit trail" indefinitely, just archiving entire tables including deleted records, and replacing them with fresh copies of the tables. As you note, having these old deleted records has proven extremely valuable more than once...