There has to be some emtpy space where the user can put his or her own widgets. I guess my idea with the dock was that the homescreen would be scrollable (also be able to function in portrait mode).

By having a scrollable homescreen I mean a small increment in where the dock can hide when inactive, but when the user decides to use it, it pops up and moves everything a bit upwards along with it, so that the widgets the user have placed themselves on the homescreen follow along to prevent anything covering up something else. Some widgets would probably be obscured by the top-header bar but that's something that's tolerable (especially since the focus isn't on the homescreen widgets when using the dock)