My gut tells me that if I was TH on the verge of a large offering of equipment, I would be ever present in this forum, providing whatever was needed to make my new potential customers comfortable with sending me their money. Yet with 2.5 hours to go until they start taking orders on devices that they do not have a working prototype on, they are absent.

Either they won't provide the proof that they ordered chips, or they will do it at the very last minute which is extremely suspicious.  

20,000 chips costs a lot of money.

All we have seen to date is a single 95% populated PCB, 30 avalon chips and some pictures of an office space.

It's borderline, barely enough data to get you comfortable, so my question is why not provide enough to get everyone warm and fuzzy?