You have to change your launcher. Nova is very popular, and I can see why. It's awesome, and the only drawback I've found is that you can't tack action memos to your homescreens. This is likely a shortcoming of the action memo function rather than Nova.
In every other aspect, it's superior to the TouchWiz launcher.
On second thought, I have to play with Nova to confirm. I think you can disable the dock, but not sure if you can hide it. It allows you to scroll the dock, so you can have more than 5-6 icons there, and scroll through. It also lets you hide the status bar.
EDIT:
You can hide the dock with a shortcut icon, but I don't see a swipe method to hide the dock. The status bar can be hidden and retrieved via swipe though.
Another EDIT:
If you buy the Prime version for $4...you can assign a swiping motion to hide the dock.