If there are miners out there willing to take losses in BTC for the sake of $ gains, my offer still stands: send me 100 BTC now and I promise I'll send you back 60 BTC once the value of BTC doubles. No hassle, no electricity cost, no hardware failures!
LOL, good analogy, I will use it everytime someone brags about how they had positive ROI because the BTC/USD exchange rate skyrocketed.
Still, for many individuals buying a miner with a CC is the easiest way to enter Bitcoin - OTC or wiring $$ to the exchanges is difficult for some people. But yeah, it's a very expensive way of entering BTC: historically buying has been superior to mining, and that's true 99% of the time except for some notable exceptions (Avalon batch #1 customers for ex.)