I prefer to get rid of the Dock in OS X as much as possible. Instead of using the Dock to start applications I use Quicksilver. For switching between applications, I use Command-Tab or the more advanced Option-Tabbing that is offered by Witch (Peter Maurer’s utilities are great: I use Textpander and Calendarclock, both of which started out as donationware and then were bought by shareware companies. I still use the original “free” versions which continue to work great. I would recommend getting Witch soon. I also recommend his ServiceScrubber).

To make the Dock (almost) disappear, I use this sequence of command line incantations (write these in a Terminal or iTerm window):

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defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool no
defaults write com.apple.dock magnification -bool no
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool yes
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation -string top
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 16

I found these in a Mac OS X Hint. As the author of the hint says: “This hides the dock in the top right corner under the menu bar, with the nice side effect of freeing up the few pixels it eats even when hidden in the other three screen edges. The few times I need it, I usually just toggle the autohide setting via the keyboard (Command-Option-D by default; configure a better one in system preferences), though it’s possible to hover the cursor just under the menu bar too.”