If you're NFS-mounting the root filesystem, you need either different areas per machine, or local disk for workspace, e.g. for /var.
/var is not enough, you also need some client-writeable files in /etc and a writeable /media and /tmp (for X etc.). Our solution is a per-host writeable NFS mount for /var and /etc/local where we link all files from /etc to /etc/local that must be written by clients (this is special and requires some maintenance tools we developed for our distribution). /media is deployed as tmpfs which works fine. /dev is not a problem anymore since 10.1 now uses a tmpfs for /dev automatically. /tmp is a local disk partition.
Maybe you might be interested in LTSP, the "Linux Terminal Server Project" [1]. They also use a single root filesystem mounted via NFS with a single central configuration file. Files that needs to be writeable are in a small symlinked ramdisk under /tmp.
Bah. My initramfs script, a beefed up version of what mkinitrd creates, _properly_ mounts an nfs and a local disk, merges them to a unionfs and voila, you get / being an unionfs, without funky symlink hacks like knoppix, with a writable and persistent layer. If desired, the local disk is cleared before building the union, effectively making it a large tmpfs.
I use LTSP for diskless X-Terminal-Clients since some years and it works like a charm :-)
[1] http://ltsp.org
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