The only way to reconcile is to think of it as you can only control 1 group at a time. So in real life, you might maneuver Gale into a fight from the south while Lae'zel from the east and your main from the north and Wyll from the northeast. In real life, they all move at the same time. Since you can only control 1 in real time, you might have to move Lae'zel, get her into the fight, then your main, then Wyll, then Gale, all in real time 1 after another. Doing this in Turn-based would be real slow and clunky.
So if you are a realist, don't abuse. If not, yeah, you can totally abuse it. Its up to the player.
You can get same exact effect if you don't start the fight with Lae'zel before you get Gale and Wyll in their positions. And if you do it that way it would benefit from enforcing the turn-based mode on Gale and Wyll, instead of current system, because they won't skip their turn (what they would do now as I was explaining to Ragnarok above).
And Dexai noticed right: the part of the problem that AI is abusing this system as well.
