Maven-publish generated pom ignores transitive flag

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Using Gradle 2.1 with the following configuration as example:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'maven-publish'
  repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}
  dependencies {
  compile ('axis:axis:1.4') {
      transitive = false
  }
}
  publishing {
  publications {
    mavenJava(MavenPublication) {
      from components.java
    }
  }
}

I would expect the generated Pom file to exclude all dependencies, the same way it would do so for this dependency configuration:

dependencies {
  compile ('axis:axis:1.4') {
      exclude group: '*'
  }
}

Is there some fundamental difference between transitive=false and excluding all that I’m missing here? Or can they be considered the same and the generated pom file is therefore incomplete?