Then I just got burned because I didn't do due diligence research on finding out how many others of these ASICs were produced.
And how could you? And not only that, you would need to know how many will be sold in the future. Thats what I said all along, without BFL telling you everything they wouldnt want you to know, you can not make an informed decision and buying their product at *any* price is purely a gamble; one that will almost certainly lose you money if BFL pursues maximum revenue. Its quite the opposite of BFL and miners interests being perfectly aligned, they are diametrically opposed.
I think more accurate calculations and assumptions can be made when BFL makes their announcement. Some people will be willing to take the risk, and others will not. If they release 1 GH/s units, it would be much more difficult to increase the difficulty quickly compared to 100 GH/s units. They'd have to ship 100x as many units that way. So the GH/s per unit is an important factor, as well as the (guesstimated) price per unit, guesstimated production capacity, etc.
And what makes you think if they announce a 1 GH unit next month, that they will not up that to 5 or 50GH later on? I mean, they could just lower the price as difficulty increases, but if they are in it for the money, the smart thing to do is fuse off miners in those chips and start by selling truckloads of Asics that are roughly comparable to singles in performance/$ (but far superior in performance/W) and steadily increase the hashrate of these units, instead of lowering the price. It amounts to the same thing, both lower performance/$ but its actually easier to pull off considering the non asic costs of every unit. Oh and then they could even sell you an "upgrade", because they care so much about their customers.
It may seem weird if you didnt think about it, but if the chips cost on the order of $10 to produce, it makes perfect sense to throttle them initially and slowly unleash their true potential. Then you make your estimates to make your "informed" purchase, and you will get burned terribly.