What I should have said was if you want to get into ASICS you will only be able to do by full payment pre-orders thus transferring a debateable amount of risk from the manufacture to the consumer.
That won't be the case once BFL catches up on their pre-orders. They'll be looking at a turnaround time of a couple of days from order to shipping then - faster than Dell can build me and ship me a computer and certainly faster than the two months or so I have to wait for built to order furniture that I've paid for.
ASIC pre-order customers have taken substantial risks - there's no doubt about that - but the option of waiting until BFL pre-orders were cleared has always been there. Those who pre-ordered wanted to be the first to get ASICs because they realise that every ASIC which hits the market diminishes the profitability of all other ASICs. Most were hoping to have their ASICs in hand before the block reward halved and thought that they'd have a significant head start on ASIC mining before a large number of ASICs were delivered by different vendors. They viewed the potential reward as being worth the risk.
The big thing to remember is that this product has one purpose - to generate income in the form of Bitcoins. That people will take huge risks in pursuit of Bitcoins has been demonstrated time and time again.