The deployment descriptors are no longer required. All stuff can be done by using metadata annotations.
The CMP (Container Managed Persistence) has been simplified. This is more like Hibernate or JDO.
Programmatic defaults : For example, the transaction model is set to REQUIRED by default. The developer sets the value only if he doesn't want use this specific value.
Reduction of the use of checked exceptions : The RemoteException is not mandatory anymore on each remote business methods.
Inheritance is now allowed, so beans can extends some base code.
The native SQL queries are supported as an EJB-QL (Query Language) enhancement.