This is a very tricky question. I got it wrong too, because of over looked the bean's
home interface and mis-interpreted to the bean's
component interface. I think jdiscuss's explanation is correct.
Back to your assumption:
Because for a Stateful bean , no two instances are ever alike..
It depends on what you are referring to: the bean instances on the sever side, or the bean references on the client side.
You may have two object references (on the client side) pointing to the same stateful session bean, e.g. the 1st was obtained directly from say home.create(100), and the 2nd was from the handle of the 1st reference.
In this case, the isIdentical should return true.