I pulled apart a dead milwaukee battery pack.
It had some nice Samsung 18650's in it. I pulled all the ties off with needle nose pliers and ended up with some good usable flat top batteries.
Depends what you plan to do with the cells. For example, to charge and use them individually ( e.g. in a torch or an LED headtorch ), then follow wyn's plan and "wind-off" the spot-welded links with pliers. To join them in a battery, by connecting in series or in parallel, leave the tabs on so that you can easily solder to them.
[ Any cells that are below 2.5v probably are duff and will not charge.]
Tons of information on YouTube on salvaging cells, basically you want to peel the spot welded tabs off the cells without damaging the cells. Cheap Chinese laptop packs are usually badly spot welded, the higher quality power tool batteries are usually well welded and might have much thicker nickel
I use small side cutters to peel the tabs off, easy enough on the negative side, be careful on the positive. It's easy to puncture the insulation and short them out.
I use a dremel to grind away the stumps of the spot welds left behind
I'm use them in my tooter (e-cig), rescued from my faulty makita batteries