TinyMCE: Copy-Paste from Google Docs
I ended up giving up on the Paste plugin into TinyMCE. Instead, I used the undocumented valid_styles property of TinyMCE. This solved the problem fine for my scenario. Here's the config snippet we ended up using:
valid_elements: "a[href|title|target],del,b,strong,del,i,blockquote,p,br,em,ul,li,ol,span[style]",
valid_styles : { '*' : 'font-weight,font-style,text-decoration' },