ASIC mining is exclusive, not in principle - nice ASIC
PCI cards and USB boxes could be built in $100, $200, $500, $1000
increments etc - but in practice because anyone with skills to make
cards has an obvious incentive to mine them themselves rather than
sell them.
First of all, welcome to bitcointalk.org!
Are we sure that there won't be any ASIC manufacturers that will sell them? All it takes is one volume manufacturer to make ASICs available to the masses.
Also, won't sCrypt eventually be dominated by specialized mining rigs any way? There are already FPGAs being developed for it, and if hashing sCrypt continues growing as a business, I think it's only a matter of time before specialized hardware is designed for it and GPU mining becomes out of reach.