Evidently as I have learned through this thread.... no these ASICs that are being designed by BFL and AVALON are specific to BitCoin... not just AN ASIC that can do the number crunching of things(hashes) like what is used for bitcoins.
Yep. Typical chips designed to accelerate operations like hashing are designed to accelerate the hash of a large object. An ASIC designed to accelerate Bitcoin mining gets much of its performance benefit from being designed to do precisely the hash operations that Bitcoin mining requires in precisely the sequence Bitcoin mining requires them to be done. A Bitcoin mining ASIC is an assembly line with many nonces in various states of hashing at the same time.