The prevailing assumption seems to be that 'mining' does not equate to buying BTC with money, but I think it's really the same thing. The only practical difference is that when mining, you're 'buying' your coins at a discount to the current market value (at the current difficulty and 0.10 / kWh electricity, you're effectively paying something over $2/BTC). That does not account for the cost of capital required to commission the mining rig in the first place, which increases the effective risk further.

The closer the value of the BTC comes to the underlying cost of energy required to mine the coins (if profit margins get very low due to some unforseen price decline), the more 'speculative' mining operations become. In that sense, they are just like a buy-and-hold approach to buying with cash on Mt. Gox or any other open market.