What tool is best for removing pages from a PDF?
For the command-line I can recommend:
pdftk, the PDF Toolkit (for the Snow-Leopard installer you can try Pacifist to get the binaries or use the older version)

Merge PDF Documents
Split PDF Pages into a New Document
Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
…

If your PDF is edit-protected, you may want to try qpdf (via e.g. homebrew) to remove the restrictions first.

QPDF is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something like pdf-to-pdf. It also provides many useful capabilities to developers of PDF-producing software or for people who just want to look at the innards of a PDF file to learn more about how they work.