- you make an instant profit the day the sale is made
Get Hardware cost in about 1 day --- then all profit
Look at it from this viewpoint: when starting an ASIC project you have the choice between: (1) pre-selling the device and getting the money today even before starting most of the project's work, or (2) spending months to develop it then
maybe mining your money back,
if no competition as launched before you,
if the exchange rate has not dropped, and
if you do not get delayed by the complexity of scaling up a mining farm (again, see ASICMINER).
Frankly, you should understand why most chose option (1).
- you "lock" such profits in USD
go to mtgox and convert BTC to $ or any other money
- scaling up is easy: no mining farm to maintain, just shipping parcels to customers
who want to ship product to customer ? they complain -- lose orders -- want support-- return product to be fixed - put shit comments on forums---
- easier to put rig in warehouse and turn on
If it is so easy, perhaps you should just go offer your services to ASICMINER and show them how it is done

They still struggle to deploy more than 6-7 Thash/s 2 months after they started (Feb 12) and they supposedly have another 5-6 Thash/s powered off doing nothing due to lack of power/cooling and network scaling issues, while Avalon has deployed 20 Th/s to customers in 2 months (batch 1), and is about to ship 40 Thash/s in the next month (batch 2).