Should Enterprise Java entities be dumb?

Question

In our legacy Java EE application, there are loads of value object (VO) classes which typically contain only getters and setters, maybe equals() and hashC

Answer 1

I think your point is valid.
See this for more - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html
With JPA, the Entities are light-weight objects. So I don't think its any problem having logic in them.

In case of use with SOAP/Web Services, I'd add a separate Facade Layer.