BFL did not receive bitcoins for preorders. BFL received USD and allowed customers to exchange BTC for USD using BitPay for their own convenience.
Customers paid in BTC. Bitpay acted on behalf of BFL (like a bank or credit card company would) to receive that BTC. What BFL instructed Bitpay to do with that BTC after receiving it is BFL's business. If BFL received USD from Bitpay, then it was only because BFL instructed Bitpay to convert the BTC into USD.
When a customer placed an order they immediately exchanged their BTC for USD and used that USD to pay for the order. This is exactly the same as if you sold bitcoins for cash, deposited cash into your bank account, then used your debit card to pay for the preorder, except that it is much much easier and quicker. BFL did not gamble on any currency, they did exactly the opposite.
You clearly did not read the bitpay faq here:
https://bitpay.com/faqBitpay does what the merchant instructs with the funds. If BFL wanted the BTC so they could escrow it and refund it like they claimed to, then Bitpay would have sent them BTC. If BFL wanted to instead spend that BTC on operations and development, then Bitpay would have converted it to USD for them.
At this point I can't tell if some of you are trolling or if you're actually this moronic.
At this point I can tell you didn't pay 200 BTC for a product in June 2012 only to have 12.5 BTC sent back to you now.
If you were truly bullish on BTC, you would have paid in USD and kept the bitcoin in your wallet. The fact that BTC is worth a lot more now then it was 1 year ago is completely irrelevant. To prove to you how absurd the logic is, lets assume BTC is worth 10% of what it was one year ago right now. Do you think it would be reasonable for any company to make you pay 10x more BTC before they would ship just because the value of BTC went down after you made your purchase and payment?
The main reason people are upset is because they made a poor decision to part with BTC and now it's worth 10x as much. The only thing that is relevant is the price of BTC in USD at the time of purchase. Anything else is sour grapes.