So I haven't been following all of the BFL drama over the past however long, but I have another concern that might be of note to this group buy.
We know that they have actual chips that work, they've shipped (a few) Jalapenos. But from what I've seen of the tear down of these devices they have 2 working chips on a board designed to house 8 chips, with a pretty beefy heatsink and fan on those two chips. They've stated they missed their power numbers, and thereby the chips run hotter than they intended. Is it possible (me not being much more than a hardware layman) that these chips run too hot for any reasonable cluster size on a PCB?
If so, then BFL could ship the chips, fully complying with the terms of the group buy, and have the money released from escrow, only to have the buyers holding chips that overheat constantly and have to be throttled or have fewer chips placed per board than intended. I think it was a surprise to a lot of people (myself included) that Josh agreed to the full escrow deal. Maybe this is why? They have a ton of chips and can only use a few per board? It would only make sense to sell them and get all the money they could out of their (our) investment at that point.
That would certainly explain why they have not released the Singles or Mini-rig prototypes. Those are supposed to be densely populated boards. Perhaps the chips cannot be kept cool. Very hard to say until they release specs and samples.