I was speaking hypothetically in the realm of "if BFL was able to ship right now in volume"
This would rely on the assumption of two things: that they could fill their existing orders of $125/$275 quickly, and that every new order placed could be priced at roughly 14-15x the current price - and people would pay it (following that people paid that much per mh/s on the USB miners)
It's very simple to logically believe that IF BFL could ship right now, they would, because they would have a monopoly on ASIC sales given their hash rates... and they could charge a LOT more for each unit.
The money they could make in BTC a day would be nothing compared to the $ they could be bringing in and then just converting to BTC
Sure, assuming they could price their product 15x and ship in bulk right now, then they would be better off shipping product. However, I don't believe they can do either.
The ASICMiner product is not really competitive. Even so, it and the Avalon chip sails have already sucked up a lot of capital that would have otherwise gone to BFL. Also, both products are being sold at inflated prices. If BFL actually enters the market, Avalon and ASICMiner could revise their prices down to compete.
But they're not capable of or willing to ship in quantity either. A couple hundred units from Avalon? So what? They aren't capable or or interested in shipping in quantity. And neither is ASIC Miner. They've said several times that the only reason they're actually selling at all, is that they can't bring more equipment online until there's mor hashing power out there, to prevent 51% of network share. So they're only selling in the mean time. Once BFL comes online, full-force, Avalon is toast, because they can't produce at speed or quantity, and ASIC Miner are gonners too, because they don't even want to be in the retail game in the first place.
If BFL starts shipping in quantity, difficulty is going to SKYROCKET, and that will create even MORE demand for their product. Anybody who spends more than a few cursory seconds on this realizes that there's WAY MORE money in selling the 'shovels' than there is in mining.
Guaranteed, there's nobody who wants BFL up and producing (and shipping) at maximum capacity more than BFL does.