For myself I fail to see how they could possibly believe they were going to ship finished products in 2012, yet as recently as last week Josh and others(Debbie) were still advising potential customers that they either still had a chance to ship in 2012 or that they had "scheduled shipments" in December of 2012 and January of 2013.
If you fail to see it, then I'm left wondering what your experience has been with vendors like BFL's fab. In my experience, they misrepresent themselves so consistently that your only option is to not trust what they say. I think BFL's issue was then trusting a vendor they had no prior relationship with, a failure on their part, but one that is easy to see how it happened. I personally have been involved in a project with a pretty similar outcome, where our trust in such a vendor ended up with 0 product on launch day. That experience has it so that I always have checkpoints early and often in my projects with these vendors, and even with new employees.