Red Hat Linux used to include the safedelete package, which provides a file deletion facility that, unlike rm, has a convenient "undelete" feature. MIT deploys a similar package on Athena, its campus-wide Unix-based academic computing system. In general, this is a sensible practice that helps mitigate the costs and risks of human error at the command line. Nautilus is tightly integrated into Fedora, and provides users a GUI with undeletion capabilities. A command-line delete/undelete facility which shared Nautilus' trash bin would continue this tight integration for the benefit of more advanced users and those who prefer keyboard input for mobility or other reasons.
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
Still missing from Fedora 7, as far as I know.
It would be easy to add a trash command to gnome-vfs, and in fact the work in progress project "gvfs" to replace gnome-vfs already has a gvfs-trash command to trash files. However, such proposals should be handled upstream, not as fedora-specific features. I don't personally think it makes sense to add to gnome-vfs at this point. We should spend time on the future instead of the past. But if anyone wants to do it it should be easy.
A gvfs-trash command appears in gvfs-0.2.5-1.fc9.i386 and gvfs-1.1.3-2.fc11.x86_64, and no doubt versions in between. Neat!