As a long-time user of FreeBSD, one of the many little things I like about that system is the way in which the automounter daemon is configured by default to allow the creation of dynamic NFS mounts through symlinking. To my delight, I've discovered that Leopard's AutoFS subsystem ships with the same capability enabled by default.
If you have an NFS server called hostname providing a filesystem /path/to/share with permissions such that it's NFS-mountable by your Leopard box, you can simply change directory to /net/hostname/path/to/share on your Mac, and you will auto-magically see the shared filesystem.
To create a permanent pseudo-mount point for this share, just use a symlink: Go to the location where you want your "mount point" to appear and create the link with ln -s /net/hostname/path/to/share. This will create a symbolic link named share, which will now provide easy access to the remote filesystem. (You can, of course, give your link a different name by using a second parameter to ln -s.)
Mounts created in this way by AutoFS are dynamic; they're created when you access them, and are automatically unmounted after a while. Your Mac will be unaffected should the NFS server "go away" for any reason. While the above should "just work" in many cases, some NFS servers (particularly Linux) require you to initiate the NFS connection from a reserved port number. You can configure AutoFS to accomplish this in one of two ways:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071217235728985