Avalon made clear at the outset that they needed pre-orders for 300 units in order for the project to go ahead.  People were begging them to increase the amount of units available in Batch 1 and they refused, which is hardly the hallmark of a greedy company.  Batch 2 orders are only being opened now and those units will be available at $1499 rather than the $1999 which was originally planned for Batch 2.  They've openly stated that pre-order money will be used to build the units.

Tom was obviously dependent on pre-order money for the bASIC project, too - we know that he needed additional funds to complete it when things went wrong even though the project had some investors from the community.

BFL is the only company which has said it had sufficient funds to develop its ASICs without pre-order money.

I seriously doubt that any of the Bitcoin vendors are going to show any meaningful profit from their first runs.