Are the dice on Modern UI Windows 8 shortcuts or the applications themselves?

Question

Windows

The question arose when they were removed. I thought that I was deleting (by analogy with previous versions) only the icons and only from the screen, and the applications were intact, and they could be found somewhere in the bowels of the file system. It turned out that the only way to get back deleted Metro apps is by reinstalling them from the Store. Does this mean that (roughly speaking) when the disk is removed, space on the HDD is freed up?
Along the way - is there a way in Modern UI to quickly restore a just deleted one, something like the "Recycle Bin"?