HOW TO DO THIS VIA THE XCODE UI (6.1):
While commenting out the offending code in Classes\AppDelegate.m will get your app approved, you want to continue benefitting from future Cordova upgrades so the best way to do this is to turn on the DISABLE_PUSH_NOTIFICATIONS symbol during compilation so this bit of code gets left out.
I come from a C# background so I understand conditional compilation but I am new to XCode so I had to do a bit of research finding out how to define compilation symbols via the UI.
Turns out the magic words are ‘Preprocessor Macro’. This is how the you can accomplish this graphically (note that this the way its done in XCode 6.1):
Hope this helps other people out there in same situation.