Great! I guess it's not the "Mac" way, but to be honest, I hide applications more frequently (by far) than I minimize them to the dock.
Some other fun things to know are that, when you hold Cmd and press Tab, the switcher bar with all the apps comes up, as you know. What you might not know is that, while this is up (keep holding Cmd but let go of tab), you can do several things, such as...
- Moving through the applications with the arrow keys (or mouse)
- Quitting an application by selecting it and pressing Q while still holding Cmd
- Hiding an application by selecting it and pressing H.