ok, it looks like it might be a tomcat versioning issue. As far as I can tell from the tomcat release notes:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/changelog.html
they started support JDK 1.5 in JSPs around 5.5.10, I think we are shipping 5.5.9, and I'm running 5.5.12 on my Mac. I reproduced your error on another system, and I'll see if I can the example working on an earlier version, as well as ask that we upgrade our tomcat version.