We use NRPE quite a bit...it works pretty much the same as it would in Nagios.  Just make sure that the "check_nrpe" plugin is available in /opt/zenoss/libexec, then you can call it within a template with the "command" datasource, with the definition similar to the following:

Simple:

check_nrpe -H ${dev/manageIp}  -t 30 -n -c check_disk!5%!3%!/

A bit more complex (uses the custom command parsing of NRPE as well as custom properties in Zenoss):

check_nrpe -H ${dev/manageIp} -c check_log -t 30 -a ${here/cNrpeCheckLogFile} ${here/cNrpeCheckLogCache} ${here/cNrpeCheckLogString}

Hope this helps,

Joseph