In this rather peculiar and specialised marketplace, normal rules don't apply. If you do away with all companies that start up with pre-order money, then you'll be left with a few that have past revenues to sustain their future development.

That would dilute any notions of competition - if there were, say, three left then there would be no real incentive to compete against each other, not when there would be such rich pickings, and like it or not, miners would end up paying a lot more for their hardware.

Just remember that buying is a choice, no one is forced to do it but they do because, as gmaxwell has pointed out, they have grand visions of making millions through mining. For most, that's simply never going to happen - you need too much money to start with to buy enough equipment, etc. That's not to say you can't make a reasonable return from a reasonable investment, especially if the chip/rig vendors stop being so greedy.

It will be very interesting to see what happens with the little ASICMiner chip - it's a nice, elegant idea but I'm sure it'll end up being hijacked by the middlemen and that end customers will never get anything anywhere near 1$/Gh let alone the headline $0.5/GH.