Yeah, me too the Trash sound was reassuring that it had happened - in fact pretty essential as in my experience the operation was sometimes laggy. I always put that down to the system being overloaded or perhaps due to having a spinning hard drive. But now is sounds like as you say Kirk "The Finder has proven to be very slow and unreliable at responding to Apple Events in later OSes ' - and that caused the delay.
It was useful when this lag was there as I sometimes had the situation of hitting the two button combination to delete an image, nothing happening so I hit them again thinking perhaps the command had not got through and then 2 images would suddenly be deleted as the system caught up, - sometimes one of these I'd not intended to delete. So I learned not to enter a further delete command until I heard aural confirmation of the first delete, - of course I also used the visual cue of seeing the image disappear, but if the delay was significant my attention could drift away from the screen and I'd still get an aural confirmation of the delete which I found very useful.
If there is now no chance of lag or malfunction then I suppose it doesn't matter and the sound is no longer of use though I'm so used to hearing it that it just seems very odd without it and in a perfect world I'd like it back! I'm so brainwashed into hearing it that now my brain kind of plays the trash sound instead!
Simon