The good news is that it looks like you can turn on the "delete means delete" option for GMail Exchange. This rolled out fairly recently, very quietly. And the option is somewhat hidden. On your phone:
- Visit m.google.com/sync and login.
- Select your device from the list of devices (probably only have 1-2). Easy way to know which is right is to look for the last sync time.
- Click on 'Enable "Delete EMail As Trash" for this device.'
This is the same way you enable the ability to send mail as an alias for Google Sync as well.
It's been working well for me. I can move mail to "All Mail" to archive, and delete to delete. It acts just like any other mail account on Exchange, which is really what I want.
The good news is that it looks like you can turn on the "delete means delete" option for GMail Exchange. This rolled out fairly recently, very quietly. And the option is somewhat hidden. On your phone:
Though it's pretty irrelevant now, for those who didn't know it before deleting Google Exchange email in the built-in Mail app worked as intended as long as you deleted it from within the "All Mail" folder. It ended up in Trash and stayed there. Deleting from Inbox moved the email briefly to Trash, then to All Mail. Deleting it from there to begin with did the trick. Not a huge hassle if you knew about it, but definitely not intuitive.