Fatal Error: Cannot access empty property in includes/entity.inc

This error occured for me when using a View to show a GeoField using the basic GeoField Map with an entity that was programmatically created to be bare bones. The error is in line 277 of entity/includes/entity.inc (also 277 of rc5, and 267 of rc3):

PHP Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in /var/www/html/d.dev/modules/entity/includes/entity.inc on line 267
I am certain that it can be avoided by a more robust set of configuration directives, however, I also think that the EntityAPI code could intercept this type of error, and perhaps should. In short, I think that perhaps this bug has two roots:

It is the result of an improperly or incompletely configured Entity (NOT a problem with EntityAPI module)
Failure to check if a property_exists before trying to access object property in
My proposed fix is below, but I wanted to get feedback on whether or not it is preferable to allow a "fatal error" because of assumptions that the module makes, or to allow "sloppy coding" of entities.

// Change
// return $this->$property;
// TO:
if (property_exists($this, $property)) {
return $this->$property;
} else {
drupal_set_message(t("Property $property does not exist on Entity of class " . get_class($this)), 'error');
return FALSE;
}