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What i'm pointing to is *pre-orders break the feedback loop*. The miners that will be coming online in the predictable future are already bought & paid for. There is no feedback loop involved -- no governor, the buyers are locked in. All the way into next year. The only choice is unloading the gear to a greater fool, or mining as long as possible to recoup some of the wasted money. The difficulty will keep going up as more pre-orders are built & put online.
Something like that.
Yup, that is true, there is a delay between paying and beginning to mine. However, there has been a market for people selling their pre-order place in line so that should mitigate the effect you describe. They weren't locked in.
I do agree though that with KNCMiner you *are* locked in. You can't sell your place in line because a) you don't know it and b) it's not clear that being first in line will result in receiving your order significantly earlier than anyone else. That's a big mistake on KNC's part, IMO.
That's one thing BFL did right - they at least allowed a secondary market to exist.
Buying & selling of pre-orders can't extinguish *any* of the hashrate that will go online once those pre-orders ship.
Once the pre-orders are placed, the hashrate *is* locked in.
Once X(MH/s) are pre-ordered, the hash rate can only increase, never decrease. The only exceptions are refunds (though if the gear exists, it will be mined), and electricity costs making mining unprofitable for certain miners (unlikely in near-term).
My point is trivial -- there exists a plausible scenario where *all* the miners who have pre-ordered their gear will be mining at a loss. This scenario is made more probable by the pre-order schemes and the constant influx of new ASIC manufacturers.