With a hearth that comes out that far, it doesn't look like you'll have much space for a dining table with chairs on both sides, while still having enough space to walk around the table and pull out the chairs.

Do you have the dimensions of the room from wall to wall, and dimensions from wall to base of the hearth?

we are going to remove the hearth and just put stone on the floor (due to code). We put our current ding room table and chairs in there and it fit. You could not walk around all of them though.

If you're going to remove the hearth altogether, then you're going to have some pretty big repairs to do on the entire structure. You may want to consider an entirely different material, depending on whether or not you like the brick at all. Otherwise, make sure you hire a very good and highly recommended mason to do the repairs so that you can't tell where the fireplace was changed.

The current mantle seems very high. I know it can't be lowered with the brick detailing around the firebox, but if you did anything, I would at least extend it the width of the fireplace.