Major Description
If cell-level ACLs are used to give a user "W" permissions to a cell, they should be able to delete that cell. In testing the Java API, I've confirmed that this is respected. Using the HBase shell, however, a user trying to delete a cell to which they don't have read permissions results in a "Row Not Found" error.
mbertozzi tracked this down to a change introduced by HBASE-5837 wherein an attempt is made to get the cell before deleting it to confirm that it exists.