Also the pre-installed apps live in the /system partition, so you wouldn't actually gain space by removing them (though uninstalling updates does free space, so doing that then disabling is safer than removing and does the same job for most purposes).
Manufacturers always quote the total installed storage, and this is always less than the real usable space. To be honest 2GB user space is about what I'd expect from a 4GB device - that's a much more compact /system partition than higher-end Samsungs have (e.g. a 16GB Galaxy S4 or S5 will have less than 10GB available to the user).