I've been using both my icloud email and phone number on my iPad mini for imessage. If I were to remove the email from "reached by imessage at:" menu and just use my phone number, would I still receive messages?
On the iMessage settings, if you tick the phone number and email address, you will receive messages from both the phone number and email address on you iPad mini. If you were to un-tick the email address, you would only receive the messages sent to your phone number but not the iMessages sent to your email address.