Comment 2 for bug 1577253

I can confirm that this is occurring. I removed Empathy from the Installed list, it displays that it's being removed, the view is then refreshed, but it was still listed with the Remove option. If you run apt-cache policy empathy, it's no longer installed:

empathy:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3.12.11-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
     3.12.11-0ubuntu3 500
        500 http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

From the package information page, the remove button behaves correctly.