No, they aren't very good. I think the problem is cultural. Programming Java gets you comfortable with extreme verbosity and tons of structure so its libraries end up like this: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server... (In extreme cases.)
Lucene was mentioned earlier - it, at least, is very good.
I have the same impression about the numerical computation and machine learning libs too.