Their website says estimated ship date is November/December. Now perhaps my math is faulty here, but that seems like two months or less from now.

If the devices have taped out and they've received initial samples and are well into the debugging and validation process, I sure haven't seen any clear indication of this. There's a wafer shot, sure, but if that's the BFL-SC wafer and it's manufactured on a modern 300mm wafer, those chips are very big! There are around 300 (give or take -- I count about 270 that aren't clipped by the edge) usable chips on that wafer shot (http://www.butterflylabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BFL-SC.jpg), so they would be at least 210mm^2. That puts them at the same size as Intel's typical chips, but then Intel makes and sells millions of chips and we're talking an ASIC that's basically targeted at one thing: Bitcoin.

And of course, they're not the only ones out there making these claims. I just find it highly suspicious that there are at least four companies all pursuing this same goal, with launch dates all relatively close together. And of course, why bother with a design that apparently uses more power and delivers lower performance if you're going to come to market four months late (e.g. Deepbit Reclaimer vs. BFL Little Single)?

If they ship this year, I'll be happy to eat crow. Heck, if they ship next year and get >50Gh/s at <500W, I'll be surprised. Personally, I'm not going to give $600+ to some place for a pre-order of a completely unproven product.