There are several projects that work on applying affine transforms on Swing components.
(SceneGraph, JXTransformer or ZoomUI)

The usual practice is keep the component off screen,
send it transformed input events and show its transformed view.

Unfortunately it is impossible to detect is a component receives particular events or not. For example, if you add a mouseListener to a component it starts consuming mouseEvents and you can detect it by reading the number of mouseListeners.

However a component can also listen for event with help of Component.enableEvents(),
there is no way for users to detect this situation

A few core Swing components use enableEvents(), see JFormattedTextField, JRootPane, JPopupMenu

public isEventMaskEnabled(long) method will make it possible to implement correct event processing for tranformed components.

This CR is filed specially for ZoomUI project
http://www.pbjar.org/blogs/jxlayer/JXLayer_two.html

which will also benefit from including JXLayer to JDK 7