I'm personally pre-ordered for the btcfpga devices (as well as avalon, which I expect to have similar economics) but I expect to lose money on them, and I wanted to support secondary players. If they arrive early enough then even if the BFL's use a lot less power a faster arriving alternative still may have turned out to be a better buy. I expect major price wars in the future, and getting on a backlog list now sounds really unwise to me even ignoring BFL's long history of schedule slips (even on this product now). (I don't begrudge them for this: doing this kind of small scale high tech stuff is hard... but it is what it is)
These are the two key points for me too:
I am not trying to make money on my pre-order of the bASIC.
I do not want to get on a huge backlog list as things will keep changing.
But most importantly, I also want to be a part of making history. I was not born yet for the first personal computers. But I look back nostalgically at using Juno for email access, having a 7 digit ICQ number, hashing with a Pentium III on SETI@Home / distributed.net, downloading Linux on the original bittorrent client, and waiting in line for the iPhone 3G on release day.
My bitcoin story is that I found out about it when GPU mining was already the norm and FPGA's were in pre-order, bought 2x5770's at clearance price (I was not willing to spend the money on an FPGA just to save some power), mined in a pool for a while, mined solo for a long time and forgot about it in the background, and now pre-ordering a 1st generation ASIC with 2 lucky blocks I found solo mining. I don't plan on buying a mining farm, I just want to replace my 2x5770's with something that will remain useful for a few more years.