I don’t know of any way to get rid of it, but you can drag it to the other side of the screen, or the center if you want the predictive text and other controls visible.
It can occationally be inconvinient, but I’m glad this feature was added. It used to be a pain to pull up the software keyboard when a hardware keyboard was active. There a few things that are impossible or hard to do on the hardware keyboard, so having the software keyboard quickly available comes in handy now and then.