If you have a nandroid made of your stock ROM with all the bloat and crap in it, then with your custom ROMs you can go in and completely gut them if you want. I know where Xliderider's coming from, before I started ROMing I never understood why poeple got rid of the bloat completely rather than just freezing it when freezing does practically the same thing. But now that I have a nandroid (actually, I have 2 just in case) made with those apps in them to restore if/when gingerbread drops, I see no reason to keep them around at all in the other ROMs I run.
But certainly freezing is an option if you want to take it slow going at first. That's a good philosophy IMO.... don't get too crazy with things you don't understand, until you understand them. Take me for example, before I flashed my first ROM I really didn't understand what a nandroid was. I had made one or two, but I still didn't know what they were. Now I'm educated to what they are, how they work, the benefits of making/storing them on your SD card, the whole bit.
So now I'm comfortable gutting the ROMs I use of any app I don't want, because I know I can recover those apps via the nandroids I've made.