it all depends on how avalon and BFL chips do. If Avalon or BFL can be the "AMD" of asics then there's  competitive force for white-box asic builders to build profitable miners. Else they won't sell any. And there will be pressure for Avalon and BFL to produce affordable chips. Right now there IS NO COMPETITION only promises. There's a handful of pre-orders being delivered, and Asicminer has the only production devices, so all the GPU miners are at a 50x disadvantage. When there's 3 companies competing to make the cheapest chips and producing real products, there will be incentive to produce profitable miners. Else nobody would buy them, and the chip makers would go bust. Look at Intel before AMD. Look at Nvidia before ATI/AMD. AT&T before the rest of them. Prices came down drastically with competition..

Maybe not ones that make 100% return in 90 days, maybe more like 10-15% return over the year, accounting for difficulty increases. That sure is better than 3% in a CD.