As a newbie who has done many hours of research, I can't say very much about BFL in general.
What is pretty obvious is that these things probably won't be worth the investment by the time people start to actually get them, assuming they do ship. We can debate whether they are fraudulent or just incompetent, but IMHO it really doesn't matter one way or the other. If I invest some money into a BFL device and actually get it someday, the mining difficulty will have risen so much that it won't be worth running for anybody other than the very first few who get them, except of course for the 'cool' factor. Whether they are legit or not, it seems that either way I would lose. At least, that's what I have gathered from the last week or trying to catch up on the issue... Am I wrong? Why / Why not?
Two factors that drove my decision (sofar) against throwing any money at BFL were the highly unprofessional conduct of the poster in this thread (like it or not, you represent the company)- his arguing, name calling, and refusal to simply post links to the answers to many folks questions. All because he claims these questions have been answered many times and the answers are out there for all to see. Nobody is asking that he sit there and type out the answers again, but posting a link would be far more effective both for the company as a whole and for his position in the discussion while requiring much less effort on his part than arguing with people. The more links there are out there to the same answers many people seek, the less people will be asking, and less people would be speculating on the alleged shady nature of their operation. Not to mention that it is just bad customer service to make folks go out and search for those answers when a simple copy/paste would make many readers happy. Secondly, these devices are bitcoin specific and won't be much good for mining others like litecoin. So assuming I did get a unit and mine with it, once the maximum amount of bitcoins have been mined I now own a really fancy paperweight.