There is a couple of other places where this fails pretty hard. If you compare to URL's on the same shared host, they will be considered equal and equality of URI's can change as the network goes up and down. I would imagine at some point (if it hasn't already) become deprecated.

Joshua Bloch used this as an example in one of the brilliant Java Puzzler video series with the net advise of don't depend on non-local state for equality.