"i don't believe these miners are real. why would anyone sell a miner when you could mine with it and make $$$ that way instead."
to which another poster replied, "because some people don't care about the profit but care about making the BTC network more decentralised and stronger and..." blah blah or someother socialist mumbojumbo.
I agree, the profit driven developer would take investment money to develop the technology, mine until the difficulty starts to rise, and then distribute devices to the buyers at a targeted ROI window. For example, an average public consumer buys a device today and receives it at a difficulty level that allows her to reach breakeven after 3-4 months of mining. The advantage over FPGA just needs to be above the threshold that ensures adoption of the technology and the strategy works. Giving away fast chips at low cost right now is literally throwing away potential profit, for everyone. It's much more sensible maintain any advantage that one may have.