It's always good advice to be cautious, but first have a look at my 'update' post put on earlier today. Thanks for reminding me. Any comment on our J/GH figure in light of the info?

Quite simply, you are incorrect here.  You are, and will remain, a buyer.  If you were an investor, you would be sending money to the company, and would expect return on your investment from the company based on performance.  People who purchase stock in a company are investors.

You are sending money to the company with the intent of receiving a product.  What you then do with that product once you have received it is not relevant to the company.  If it so happens that this product makes you some money, then so be it. 

Your investment is in BTC.  By purchasing a miner, you are making a decision to actively support the BTC network.  That's what mining is: supporting and helping secure the network.  You are rewarded for your efforts with generated coins.

What Novello is stating is the following (and yes, I'm taking their entire plan and compressing it to a couple of sentences): We are going to build mining hardware that will be competitive and allow the "little guy" to remain in the mining game.  We are going to do this by providing great price-to-hash value in the hardware, and by providing relatively inexpensive ways to continuously upgrade your existing hardware.  To achieve our goal of great hardware at a great price, we need capital; and, to receive that capital we are looking to the mining community to believe in us and pre-order our hardware.

Whether or not they succeed with their mission remains to be seen.  They have a long, tough road ahead of them, both to secure funding and to produce the hardware on time and on budget.  As can be seen throughout this post, MANY of the very people they are hoping will invest are extremely skeptical from being burned so many times in the past by other companies.