You have to keep in mind that entity beans were developed in a time before generics, annotations, and widespread use of byte code enhancement that made a lot of the easy, magical stuff we take for granted possible.
I remember. During the same time period, I wrote some Java apps that used plain old JDBC, plus some of my own helper functions for data mapping. They were lighter weight and higher performance compared to the "enterprise" Java solutions. Unfortunately they weren't buzzword compliant though.
