Technically they were investors as it was known at the time that BFL did not have this technology in hand and would be creating, testing and perfecting it.  Purchasing something that you KNOW is in development is an investment into the company to produce said items.  Look at ASICMiner, originally he set out to build units for sale, but then decided to mine with them instead and pay out dividends.

@Sgtspike I believe you mean June 2012, as they were not offering ASICs in 2011.

I myself didn't order until June of this year, and unlike the majority of people I see whining, I am content to wait as I know they are in production and I will get what I paid for.  I daily laugh at the comment of people crying because 'they are losing out on potential mining profits' all because BFL is a scam.  Since BFL *is* shipping, they aren't a scam.  They may have been too optomistic about what they could produce and when, but they aren't a scam.  If they were truly a scam, no one would have received a single piece of equipment and they would have vanished into the night never to be heard from again.

Let's look into this 'loss of mining profits' a second though.  Let's assume BFL did fulfill they expectations and shipped back in Nov or Dec last year.  Boom, network difficulty skyrockets.  Conservative estimates from just using people who listed their orders are that over 1 PetaHash of speed would have been added to the network from the 1st 6 months orders.  Imagine that the network speed jumped by 50x in December 2012.  GPUs would be worthless for BTC now and altcoins would be flooded with them, causing their difficulty to also rise.  Guess what though?  BTC is < $30.  People anxious to recoup their investments are dumping their coins and prices drop (sound familiar?  BTC dropped from $120 to $60 after the network hash almost doubled in the last 2 months, it has since rebounded to about $90).  The dynamic has shifted though and ASIC mining is the only way to go, only with the network hash where it is, ASIC cost is getting prohibitive.

Now where are we though?  Would Bitcoin have taken off in April if ASICs ruled the market and the average Joe would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to be competitive?  Would we still have dozens of alt-coins to play with?

None if it matter thou, cause it is all speculation abiout 'what if....'.  There are a lot of people who would not now be in BTC mining if ASICs had come out on schedule cause it would never be worthwhile unless BTC could somehow spike to $1000 or more.