It is as useless to compare an investment in BTC with an investment in a mining machine as it is to compare an investment in gold mining equipment with an investment in gold itself.
LOL... How is it useless? Investors in gold are doing it all the time! You obliviously have little to no experience in gold investments.
Investment in gold = Investment in shares of gold mining companies = Investment in gold mining equipment. This relation is so obvious that it doesn't require any special arguments.
Investment in BTC is 100% equal to investment in bitcoin ASIC! Price elasticity between the two is zero! If bitcoin price drops to zero the price of your bitcoin ASIC will drop to zero as well becauser a bitcoin ASIC is useless for anything else but mining bitcoins. You'll even have to pay a fee to dump it in electronic garbage depo.
It doesn't really matter if they paid in BTC or in USD for their ASICs one year ago. They are losers both ways. If they purchased BTC with the USD they spent for "pre-orders" they'd be much more profitable than waiting for an ASIC for one year and trying to make a profit now. This difference in profitability is confiscated by BFL to the extend that BFL customers will never see positive bitcoin ROI. I'm envisioning the average BFL customer, of course. BFL crooks have bribed a large group of bitcoin activists including mods on this forum. This is the only reason they still don't have official scammer tag there!