Is there a way to remove hair particles in particle edit mode? Is there some way to fully remove hair particles (e.g. with a brush) while in particle edit mode?

Ideally this would actually remove the particle, instead of e.g. making it tiny with the cut brush. The problem with cutting particles until they are invisible is that they will still affect child particles:



The above example uses interpolated child particles.

Blendfile
Yes, you can select the hair particles and press X or Delete. 



To give credit where credit is due, thanks to Dan Eicher for pointing this out on the developer mailing list.



There does not seem to be a brush for doing this, but you can use circle select (C) to select hair particles with a brush.