Just so everyone who may be dialed into this thread knows it sure looks like a bug. Got a friend in professional services to test this for me and confirmed it blows up in a couple of other deployments. I was able to work around the issue by creating my own workflow and directly making calls to the services... here is a snippet. I snagged a good chunk of this code from other posts. Sorry for not giving specific credit 
var operations = item.getOperations();
var tryCnt = 0;
while (!reconfigOp && tryCnt < 24) {
tryCnt++;
System.debug("trying " + tryCnt);
for each (var op in operations) {
System.log(op.name + "::" + op.id);
if (op.name === "Change Owner") {
reconfigOp = op;
break;
}
}
if (!reconfigOp) {
System.sleep(5000);
operations = item.getOperations();
}
}
if (!reconfigOp) {
System.error("No resource action for Change Owner could be located. Could be an entitlement issue.");
}
else {
var requestTemplate = vCACCAFERequestsHelper.getRequestForResourceAction(reconfigOp)
var jsonData = vCACCAFERequestsHelper.getResourceActionRequestData(requestTemplate);
var json = JSON.parse(jsonData);
//Change provider-NewOwner
json["provider-NewOwner"] = {"type":"entityRef", "classId":"principal", "id":newOwner, "label":""};
//This puts everything back in the right format:
vCACCAFERequestsHelper.setResourceActionRequestData(requestTemplate, JSON.stringify(json));
//And this actually says go do the work:
var request = System.getModule("com.vmware.library.vcaccafe.request").requestResourceActionWithRequestTemplate(reconfigOp, requestTemplate);
var changeOwnerRequest = request;
var requestCompletion = null;
var loopCnt = 0
var completionState = null;
if (request) {
while (!requestCompletion) {
loopCnt++;
//System.log("Execution Status: " + request.getExecutionStatus().value());
//System.log("State: " + request.getState().value());
requestCompletion = request.getRequestCompletion();
if (requestCompletion) {
completionState = request.getRequestCompletion().getRequestCompletionState().value();
System.log("RequestCompletionState: " + completionState);
}
else {
System.sleep(5000);
}
if (loopCnt > 24) break; // should not take more than a couple of minutes to finish.
request = vCACCAFEEntitiesFinder.getResourceActionRequest(host , request.getId()) ;
changeOwnerRequest = request;
}
}
else {
throw "Failed to submit Change Owner";
}
if (completionState == null || completionState != "SUCCESSFUL") throw "Change Owner Failed.";
}
