Pascal - looking at the code, it appears that the explicit deletion of images should be unnecessary. content_item__delete calls content_revision_delete which in turn will call acs_object__delete to delete the content revision and any sub-types that depend on the 'content revision' type. Since images are a subtype of 'content_revision', everything should be happy. I would suggest just trying it out, but Vinod has recently uncovered a pg bug that affects content_revision__delete which in turn affects content_item__delete, so until we get that fix, you can't really test it.
Vinod - have you heard anything back about your bug submission?