I keep it on the bottom of the screen, autohide and magnification turned on.
It might just be me, but after upgrading to Mountain Lion, I had a hard time distinguishing which of the apps in my dock were running (the little lights were hard to see). So I used a Terminal hack to make my dock 2D, so that the lights would be more visible.
One feature I really like in Windows 7 is the window preview that appears when you hover the cursor over running apps pinned to the taskbar…to replicate this in OS X, I installed Hyperdock (shown in my screen shot).
I’m excited at the prospect of higher quality notebook displays, but with Haswell still unreleased, I’d be hesitant to buy one without discrete graphics.