I think it does count as getting your deposit back. Any time you put in a deposit and get it back it has most likely lost value due to inflation. You're pointing out the obvious.

To some, probably to most, guarantee of getting a deposit back beats uncertainty of an investment where you might get a high return at first but no guarantee of ever breaking even or getting back your deposit.

A lot of people call bitcoin a Ponzi, which while there are similaries and I can see why they would say that, is technically incorrect. But a mining company like this one one step closer to a Ponzi. The returns are guaranteed to go down due to difficulty. Quoting an annualized rate of return is bogus because is not reasonable to assume that the rate of return so far will not either decrease or increase wildly over the remainder of the company's 1st year. Just to point out the risk involved, in order to maintain the current level of return , new mining hardware has to be continually added to keep up with difficulty. This means new investment is regularly needed to purchase more mining hardware, just to maintain an initial rate of return.

Of course that comes with the standard disclaimers that both BTC value as well as difficulty could either increase or decrease. No one knows, and what you are doing when you invest here is essentially making a bet on what will happen with those two factors. Plus you also play a juicy premium to have the mining company run the mining for you.

EDIT: Fixed typo deflation -> inflation.