After much digging, i believe that this problem is related to me not having any platforms added for phonegap to build from. This is missing from their documentation.
Wh
Actually you might have them ready and working but on windows there is an ACSII bug... instead of showing ✔ and ✖ it shows ?.
http://www.raymondcamden.com/index.cfm/2013/8/15/Using-the-PhoneGap-CLI-on-Windows-Watch-out-for-this-bug