Dock? What Dock?

From my days of working on 15-inch LCDs, I have long hidden Mac OS X’s Dock. After all, I wanted to maximize my screen real estate. I still do this on my 12-inch PowerBook, for the same reason. On my Cube, however, I have a 19-inch Princeton LCD and my Apple 15-inch Studio Display. Plenty visual expanse, right? Yet old habits die hard, and I have found that I do not miss the Dock at all.
I am not one of the many whom have not cared for the Dock since OS X first rolled out. On the contrary, I rather enjoyed having it. But the addition to the operating system of cool switching via Command-Tab, and my usage of–nay, addiction to–LaunchBar, has rendered for me the Dock irrelevant. If the current beta of LaunchBar 4 is any indication, the final release of this new revision is going to ensure my hands stay on the keyboard even more.
Finder usage will not be going away any time soon. I still need that for moving files about via drag-and-drop, and I have customized my Finder toolbar with various apps for such drag-and-drop operations. One example would be opening archive files of various denominations by dropping them on Stuffit Expander. I know the command-line junkies will tell me that I can do all of that from the Terminal, thus ensuring my hands stay on the keyboard even more. However, for some operations, such as the example above, I believe I am faster with the mouse than typing in pathnames to drill down to the file I want.