I hope the result of all this is the establishment of some laws that will
- Prevent hardware manufactures from also operating as miners, to prevent them from mining with consumer funds/equipment.
- Places controls on prices so that manufactures are not over charging for hardware.
The first point is very important. It's a conflict of interest. They sell 'used' hardware to customers who believe they are getting 'new, unused' items. It also causes difficulty to rise sooner, thus requiring the customers to buy 'newer', 'faster' hardware more often.
I strongly agree with your first point. I think that any bitcoin mined by hardware that is used for "testing" should be used to first pay for electricity the equipment uses, and then be distributed to the pre-order customers (after the "pre-order" phase is over there is no reason for any kind of delays in shipping) in proportion to how many machines were ordered (a customer who ordered 10 machines should get 10x the amount that someone who ordered 1 machine - assuming there is only one "model" being sold).
On your 2nd bullet, I strongly disagree we need laws for this. If a miner is being sold for too much money it will not be purchased by anyone.