sometimes it does not split cleanly (and updating the vfstab N clients becomes a chore, no matter how automated you have it (well, save for NIS, but who does that?)).
Have you looked at cfengine?
http://www.iu.hioslo.no/~mark/cfengine/
We manage all of our NFS mounts, related directories, symlinks, and fstabs with a cfengine script that is about 40 lines long. Changes are easy since it's all centralized.
Kelly