You will need a PCM tune. It's been evolving through the years so it'll mostly be a model-specific approach. The newest trucks and SUVs are eat up with TM. My 07 Yukon, while more powerful, isn't near as responsive as my old 05 5.3 was. The damned thing just doesn't do what you want it to. If it wasn't my wife's primary vehicle it would've been tuned a long time ago.
What TM does is dial back the throttle and cut fuel/ignition at certain times (mainly during shifts) to save wear and tear on the transmission. Problem is it's annoyingly overbearing for most people. A family member of mine had a trailblazer with the 4.2L I-6 and when he had it tuned, we found out that GM had the thing set up so that if you floored it from a stop, the PCM wouldn't command more than 30-40% throttle until you reached almost 3500rpm, where it would taper in the rest. Then during the shifts it literally killed almost all fuel and spark causing the engine to fall on it's face as the shift completed. Very annoying. After the tune it felt like a whole different truck. If it wasn't for the exhaust sound you could've sworn we swapped in a V8.
It's not quite that bad in the trucks and full size SUVs, but it's still there. I personally wouldn't remove more than 50-60% in stock form since GM more or less used the TM to cheap out on beefing up the 4L60E for the last 6-8 years it was in production. If you get the trans built with all the good parts (topic for another thread), then you can safely remove all the torque management up until about 500hp. After that you will want to dial back power on the shifts to keep from breaking hard parts in these heavy trucks.
Other things to note during the tune, get rid of the adaptive shift function and minimize the PWM function (tuner will know what to do). If you add a corvette servo, the PCM will recognize the firmer shifts and start trying to soften them up. Removing adaptive shift stops this nonsense.
