You're correct that the particular tools and XML everywhere culture of the Java ecosystem isn't a property of Java itself. However, the verbosity and corresponding lack of expressiveness of Java does, I think, have an impact.
Elegance seems to be much more highly valued in the Lisp world than in the Java world.
All the enterprise users want the tool to fit their work flow. They don't want to have to change their workflow to fit the tool (no matter how stupidly inefficient their workflow is). This means that the enterprise tool vendors all need to create tools that are highly configurable. In fact, they often have to be customized for each different customer.
This leads to enterprise software vendors trying to write extension/customization languages for their tools. And of course, they almost all do it badly, and they all do it differently. (If you're hearing an echo of Greenspun's tenth law here, well, yes, I think that this is exactly what he was talking about.)
Maybe it'd better to write that as: Only the languages that suffer from similar issues get wide adoption at the enterprise level. (Yet, I don't think that completely captures causality.)
Enterprise architects have a surprisingly big diversity of culture. I'd look first at the process by what enterprises choose their development stacks. It often has little input from architects, developers, testers, or admins.
My employer does enterprise consulting in Fortune 500 companies, the developer stacks and architecture designs we sometimes end up doing, chosen by architects, end up in what is usually called "space station architecture".
Elegance seems to be much more highly valued in the Lisp world than in the Java world.