Why does JPA have a @Transient annotation?

Because they have different meanings. The @Transient annotation tells the JPA provider to not persist any (non-transient) attribute. The other tells the serialization framework to not serialize an attribute. You might want to have a @Transient property and still serialize it.

Java's transient keyword is used to denote that a field is not to be serialized, whereas JPA's @Transient annotation is used to indicate that a field is not to be persisted in the database, i.e. their semantics are different.