[nitrous9200]

Yes, by removing a lot of unnecessary/unwanted elements included by Verizon and Samsung, you can free up a lot of space. Thing is, you already have that space, but it's occupied by that preloaded junk; a custom ROM will start out without all of it thereby giving you the space to do what you want with it. For example, I've got about 112MB free with a few programs and their data installed.