It seems the fix is to add the hibernate.transaction.jta.platform property to the persistence.xml file as hinted here:

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/4.1/devguide/en-US/html/ch07.html#services-JtaPlatform

Is this just a workaround or is this how it is supposed to work? Is the developer guide indicating I'm using a legacy configuration?

For those trying to get this to work on GlassFish it seems the value of the property needs to be org.hibernate.service.jta.platform.internal.SunOneJtaPlatform