Entity Framework: Data Centric vs. Object Centric

I'm having a look at Entity Framework and everything I'm reading takes a data centric approach to explaining EF. By that I mean that the fundamental relationships of the system are first defined in the database and objects are generated that reflect those relationships.

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Examples

Quickstart (Entity Framework)

Using Entity Framework entities as business objects?

The EF documentation implies that it's not necessary to start from the database layer, e.g.

Developers can work with a consistent application object model that can be mapped to various storage schemas

When designing a new system (simplified version), I tend to first create a class model, then generate business objects from the model, code business layer stuff that can't be generated, and then worry about persistence (or rather work with a DBA and let him worry about the most efficient persistence strategy). That object centric approach is well supported by ORM technologies such as (n)Hibernate.

Is there a reasonable path to an object centric approach with EF? Will I be swimming upstream going that route? Any good starting points?

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Model First approach seems to be what you need.
We suggest to take a look at the ADO.NET Team Blog article also.

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A while after asking this, I discovered that EF 4 supports POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects), allowing an object-centric design with (relative) ignorance of persistence.

This article was the best one I came across discussing that approach, while this article explains how to use code generation templates to ease the work.