I've investigated several eclipse Trace classes, Almost all of them use sysout for trace elements, and only delegate to eclipse's logging framework for actual errors. Tracing is primarily used for debugging, and is typically sent to console only. Tracing is almost never sent to the debugging framework. 

org.eclipse.ecf.identity.Trace
org.eclipse.jst.server.core.Trace
org.eclipse.ui.browser.Trace

I'm not sure if you've ever used the tracing mechanisms in eclipse plugins. You can turn on tracing for specific plugins, and output is ALWAYS sent to console. 

In fact, looking at these other examples, the fact that I'm logging some is actually the incorrect behavior!