You can remove all of the Google apps, though. (You can't remove the storage space they take up on the phone's ROM, as they ship on the stock device so that they don't need a download at setup time, but you can completely disable them so that they're treated as not installed.)

Also, these days, people consider photos, music, videos, email, and similar to be core phone functions; frankly, many people use them more often than they make phonecalls.

(Personally, I disable around half of those apps, along with Chrome.)