Largecoin was confirmed by ttul to be s-asic, if I remember correctly.
I believe the current claim is that its a custom asic, but of course, whats in a name, a structured asic like fast path I guess is also "custom" and .. application-specific, and its an integrated circuit.. so, it wouldnt be a real lie.
s-asic always seemed the obvious way to go to me, I was even convinced thats what BFL did. Compared to fpga, it seriously lowers per unit cost with reasonable volumes, it has good potential to lower power consumption considerably and the NRE is not nearly as extreme as with a full custom design.