If BFL and Avalon can't provide significant hashpower to the community, ASICMINER may be forced to either hold back hashpower for a while or push the date for creating customer ready devices. Anything above a 1/3 target for the hashpower hashrate is thin ice because of the fleeting trust in the decentralized nature of bitcoin.
I could not agree more! ASICMINER could adjust hashrate with a feedback loop to keep it at a constant level of below 50% with some safety margin.
What does that help? Unless someone checks how many of their chips are ready for activation, they'd still de facto have 51% control they can enable at will. Bitcoin is not decentralized as soon as they have the
ability to control the network and thereby do things like undo transactions or require arbitrary fees for block chain inclusion.