Cordless tools, such as drills, in the past 10 to 15 years have actually primarily been using NiCd and not NiMh battery chemistry. As much as I hated NiCd in the past for general-purpose rechargeables, they have worked amazingly well in high-drain, high-torque devices such as drills, nail guns and small saws.

The only positive experiences I've ever had with Li chemistries are from notebooks using Li-Ion. In my Nokia phones the batteries wore out quickly as they have in my Harmony 880 (same battery as the Nokias). In Sony Mini-DV cameras that did not get every day use batteries at over $100 each also didn't last long before they could not be charged at all. Same thing for my last HP iPaq pocket PC. Generally speaking, I think Li chemistries are shite and only suited to devices used daily, preferrably with some type of mains-connected backup mode, such as a notebook. I would not be in any rush to buy a power tool using Li-Ion or Li-Poly, that's for sure.

Also, it's not fair to say that any DeWalt tool "is B&D" - while owned by B&D, you can't compare the quality of products between the two brand lines. That would be like saying a Chrysler was the same as a Mercedes while being run by Daimler. In the end what's important is the quality of the brand itself. Take Apple for instance, it doesn't "manufacture" anything at all - everything is contracted out to one or more Chinese OEM/ODMs for production, assembly and packaging.