This idea that some people have that a company is going to invest millions of their own dollars into designing and producing their own chips, then give them away for far less then what they'll earn on the network with same day shipping instead of mining with them themselves is a pipe dream.
You're assigning too little weight to an essential economic fact, and one that has influenced the way venture investment has proceeded in bitcoin, and will continue to proceed.
That is:
bitcoins are not money. They have to be
converted to money. A big miner has to convert a quantity which grows continuously, and do so without the benefit of a real futures market, or the ability to short sell in any meaningful size, and without significant transactional - that is, non financial - demand. That's not easy.
How do you convert them to money? Well, one way would be to make machines, and sell them - for money - to people who mine with them. What they do with the bitcoins is their problem.
Do you know the name Meyer Guggenheim? He was a bright young man who went out to the gold rush in California, and quickly figured out that to make the big money, day in and day out, one should
refine the gold, not mine it. The Guggenheim fortune was and is one of largest in American history.
EDIT: In light of a court document that's making the rounds from the
Pirate case, someone might take issue with my claim that bitcoins are not money. In the sense I'm using the term here, the legal or even economic "money nature" of bitcoins is not important. What's important is this: Right now, you could sell 35million EUR for $1.33857, or buy 18million EUR for $1.33860, and that's just on the screen open in the background where I'm typing. You can buy or sell 10 thousand ounces of gold for prices only a few cents per ounce different. You can't do that -yet- in bitcoin.
So, strictly, I shouldn't have said, bitcoins are not money. I should have said bitcoins have poor fungibility.