I have a few of them that the wife had installed. The ones I have will work with just a controller, but we have them wired into the alarm system for monitoring as well.
If I recall correctly, they listed for $100/ea for the smoke detectors, but we were having the rest of the house alarm system upgraded significantly, so we got the fire monitoring gear (3x smoke, 1x CO, and 1x heat) for nothing.
They're FSA 210s from DSC. They run $30-40 by themselves. Photoelectric smoke with a built-in thermocouple heat detector and a loud-ish alarm. Mine do not have an independent battery per-unit. We have a battery for the whole system. I'm actually backed up with two 120v that are original to the house and one battery unit from Kiddie. They were actually the whole system when I bought the place, and I saw no particular need to tear them out.
They go off every time I test them. The heat detector in the kitchen can't be nondestructively tested, but I did test one, and it works!