I've done the upgrading of jails with ezjail and it works great.
The only difference for me is that I've built an internal release engineering process. With a internal release, customized or not, it is very easy to streamline the upgrade process.
In using the native 'make release' process, it will not only create bootable and installable FreeBSD ISO's (possibly modified), and also create the 'ftp' hierarchy. If you place the ftp hierarchy on an internal ftp server, you can just point your ezjail-admin to that ftp server and have it do the work for you.
So when there is a patch release, patch the source code. Build the ISOs, and push your ftp source, and update your jails.