i doubt these fpgas will beat undervolted 7970 by much at all, maybe some weak amount like 30% and yet cost 3x the price. Not worth it.
Agreed.
The whole point of SCRYPT was to hardware proof against ASICS.
Which is ridiculous because asic's can mine scrypt too. The reason people say scrypt is "asic proof" is because the scrypt algorithm requires a good deal of high speed memory which most asic's don't have. A dedicated individual or company could produce an asic based scrypt miner if they design it to provide sufficient memory. We are years away from that most likely. The asic market is just kicking off with bitcoin so don't expect to see scrypt fpga's or asic's for some time
Providing sufficient memory that can be accessed in a timely manner is what makes GPUs cost the price they do. Also, as you increased memory, your savings on power consumption diminish. The problem isn't that you can't mine scrypt with ASICs, the problem is that the efficiency gains of doing so are negligable at best, subpar at worst. People lucked out with SHA256, ASICs could be designed that gave significant efficiency gain. If you check out the FPGA situation, it really isn't looking promising.