[potato3732842]

Ignoring the cost of the battery how much does a cordless drill that'll break your wrist cost? A non-trivial amount more than the corded one that's for sure. You're gonna see comparable cost difference in just about every "final appliance" that actually turns the jiggling electrons into results (whether those results are work or heat).

Alternating current is substantially easier to step up/down in voltage, much nicer to anything that modulated current flow and has a lot of convenient aspects for motors. Like for like the DC solution costs just a little bit more every step of the way.

Even if you're not doing long distance transmission the cost of all those things that are worse about DC are going to be bore across the entirety of your economy that uses AC. DC makes sense here because the supply chain is so dysfunctional that making the "better" solution work would actually cost more than the "12v doodads from china" style solution. Eventually as electrification continues the choice of DC will become a drag though.

[kragen]

I don't think this is correct. Drills use "universal" motors which don't care if they're running on AC or DC, because 60Hz AC motors are limited to 3600rpm, which isn't nearly fast enough for a drill, and also because it's not okay if the drill stops working if it hits resistance and slows down. (Most AC motors run at a fraction of that.) You can run a cheap electric drill off 120Vdc just as easily as 120Vac. Getting it to run on 48Vdc or 30Vdc involves rewinding the motor with the same amount of copper in the form of thicker wire.

Fancy drills already have a lot of electronics that do care about the polarity of the applied voltage, but they usually want it to be DC. Once you get anything more sophisticated than phase-angle control with a TRIAC, you're using MOSFETs anyway, and you can often use half as many of them if you're using DC, because MOSFETs like DC.