Like Kevin Menard who submitted JIRA 1932 on this, I'm working on data objects coming from our app's business layer. We may need to support several front end or web service technologies with our domain objects, so we don't want them to know about Tapestry. I want (badly) to be able to use BeanEditForm on them, but I can't go in and put @Validate on properties in those objects. A workaround is to inject the beaneditform component into the page class and check validation on success of the form, but that undermines client-side validation.
In (closed) JIRA 1932, Howard says: "Most of the things you want to do, outside of validation, are already supported..." But validation is the entire point. Kevin has a great suggestion there with model.add("some_text_property").addValidation("required") -- Bill @ PeoplePad