MakeNetCDFFeatureLayer_m is the key tool. It will convert the netCDF to points.
There are lots of arguments to the tool, making it pretty flexible.
I used it (for a 9.3 geoprocessor) thus:
netCDF = r"c:\thePath\theNetCDFFile"
outLayer = "Xout_Layer"
gp.MakeNetCDFFeatureLayer_md(netCDF, "uvel;vvel",
"lon", "lat", outLayer,
"lat;lon", "", "", "", "BY_VALUE")
This extracts the lat/long located cell centers as lat/long points with uvel and vvel attributes to a layer.
with arcpy, use python lists instead of semicolon delimited strings for the variables and dimension lists.