Hi Tristan,
I'm currently repeating your experiment with 100 copies of the file you linked to. One question I have: did the moves you attempted come directly after the import? Since these TIFFs are fairly large (6K x 6K), the first thing the server does is to generate pixel pyramids for them at multiple resolutions. This processing overhead is certainly a portion of the CPU consumption you were seeing. Once the processing is done for all 100 images, I'll test the move operations and see how it goes.
Cheers,
~Josh