If the BTC price collapses to $10 per BTC again, it might be better just to buy up a load, to be fair. If the BTC price is high, investing in ASIC mining may still make a lot of sense, but having burned my fingers a little (thankfully not too much) with the bASIC débacle, I'm out of any "pre-order" shenanigans for good now.
Yeah, ultimately everything depends on the BTC price. That said, some feel $30 is way under-priced... but who really knows anyway, right?
Difficulty is about to explode. No ones knows for sure how many asics have been ordered/are being assembled, but 500TH over the next 6 months seems like a low estimate to me. BFL alone should be in that ballpark, and they are only one of 3 or 4 players. That means difficulty will likely be >20x higher than today by the time you get your mini rig. And thats only when you start mining, its not like it will stop there, as you wont be the only one ordering and getting hardware late. In case you hadnt noticed, people have been ordering from BFL since august last year, and none have shipped today. So dont expect an order today to ship next week, or month.
In all likelyhood, if you order today, it will never repay itself (when both purchase and revenue are expressed in bitcoin), but if you feel like gambling, dont let me stop you.
Even with difficulty exploding... it should all balance out in the end, right?
Let's say, for argument's sake, there are currently 10,000 GPU miners trucking along today. Due to the cost of power, they are basically breaking even (from what little I understand and hear on #bitcoin). If 50% of them switch over to ASIC and another 25% enter the market, that still leaves a gap when things "settle down" in difficulty (we'll always see the same number of coins mined, regardless of difficulty) which would mean it would (at least) be more profitable to mine then than it is now. Any logic there even though I'm pulling numbers out of my arse?
And yes, it does seem a lot like gambling. I'm not much of a random chance gambler, though I do love me some Texas Hold'em