Yep, rather unique item, as far as I know, there's never been such thing as a hand to hand weapon before. Seems like a contradiction in terms. I guess you have to imagine it as if were something like brass knuckles, weapon damage is based on your ability to punch, rather than handling a weapon. At least that's how I make sense of it.
More useful to beastlords than monks, it seems. At least to monks above 30. Beastlords will get more mileage out of it than monks would.
I would disagree. These weapons are very nice for monks, even at the higher levels. Consider the Monk fist damage/delay table(if you're fighting H2H without Luclin items, chances are you're using a fist) (here's hoping there are no wierd formatting things the forum system does to posts.)
These weapons have a ratio of 3. That's a good ratio. A humans fist won't have a ratio like that until level 35, and an Iksar won't have it until level 40(when it will actually be slightly better with the fists). But, the raw delay, and this is what is the real key when things like haste and damage bonuses start to get figured in, on a Monk's fists won't get below this until level 59 for Humans, and level 60 for Iksar!
Are there better choices for weapons? Sure. Are there better choices that use the hand to hand skill? Not many, and certainly the fists aren't a great choice for quite some time.
Not sure where you're getting those statistics from. They don't seem quite accurate based on observation... then again, my monk had outgrown h2h weapons before they were even available to her. It seems that this item would be useless to the level of monks that can get it from the source, but if they bought it earlier, yes, they could get some mileage out of it. But even you have to admit that beastlords will be able to get good use of it long after monks have discarded them in favor of fists. Beastlords have great h2h fighting capability, but will always be second to monks in that regard.
At the very latest, monks will want to give this up at 40.