A better thing to debate would be how AM will stack up against the competition. And looking at the competition(or lack of) it seems to me that asicminer will have an easy time coming out on top if they can just deliver.
Yup, it appears that delivering is the key to success in this 'new industry'. But i think AM were the first to understand this back then when they were the first movers. imho, for a company that want to be sustainable in such a fast moving environment it is most important to be honest/realistic when talking about delivering schedules. When looking at the competition i believe they had to move much faster than AM and without the time to consider a long term 'vision'. Plus, it is obvious that such strategy made them suffer from delays (for example, look at that butterfly labs who lost so much credit, if not all). I believe KNC are having a hard time delivering also actually?!
Anyhow, the thing is with AM that they are located in the world's most important city regarding chip designing/manufacturing and that is quite a real/solid advantage on which i am ready to stand for. I would go even further in saying that if they could not deliver in time, it should not be that important, as i believe that as a serious company, they've done their work on some worse case scenarios. They're here for the marathon.. not the sprint.