  We present a comparative study of CoO2 layers in the Bi-misfit and NaxCoO2
cobaltates. Co NMR measures the intrinsic susceptibility of the Co layers and
is not affected by spurious contributions. At low dopings where
room-temperature thermopower (TEP) is large, Curie-Weiss susceptibilities are
observed in both materials. But NMR and muSR experiments find neither charge
nor spin order down to low temperatures in Bi-misfit, in contrast to the case
of NaxCoO2. This demonstrates that metallicity, charge and magnetic orders are
specific of the Na layers in NaxCoO2 whereas strong correlations are generic of
the cobaltates physics and could explain the large TEP.
