styles are are exposed through a layer of indirection - not by API. The fact that they're backed by real bean methods would be something that ideally wouldn't be exposed to callers.
I actually think that the way styles are implemented is fairly elegant. From the component's perspective, they are simply key/value pairs, which decouples the component from the skin nicely. On the other hand, developers can easily read the Javadoc to see what styles are supported and what the expected types and values are.
G
