BFL is reporting the pay-dates they've already shipped by models several times/week. Today they reported shipping 10-calendar-days worth of Jalapeno orders in a single shipping day.
The problem with reporting shipping by "day's worth of orders" is we don't know how many units were paid for on that day. Could be 2. Could be 20. Could be 200. It gives us very little insight as to the rate at which BFL is able to ship units out. For whatever reason, BFL feels it should not reveal how many actual units are leaving the building each day. They claim they can do 300 units a day, but can't seem to make any progress past the first day of orders after 10 days of working on singles and mini-rigs. So did they build and ship 3000 singles in 10 days? Did BFL just add 150 TH/s to the hash rate in the last 10 days? Who knows?
The fact that they are shipping out sample chips to bulk chip purchasers in a timely fashion suggests that delays are due to issues with other parts and/or assembly and not due to delays in chip acquisition. Not that it's fair but I think BFL chip purchasers will have working clones before many of those who bought miners...
Shipping a couple of sample chips is very different than shipping a couple of thousand chips. It is very possible that BFL is running low on chips and the bulk of their customers (as measured by hash rate) will have to wait until they receive the next order (100 days lead time).
Well, the evidence is they are accelerating the amount of "days-worth" each shipping day, but there's still limited info available. Is it because order volumes dropped, or increase production rate, or both? BFL will not release data on amount of orders for each calendar day. Not even public companies do that, so why crow about it? To get some indication about the specific ordering period sales rate, one could look at the data BFL customers volunteered at
http://bfl.ptz.ro/ :
Period 10/7/12 to 10/16/12: 52 Jalapeno orders registered
Period 10/17-10/27: 29 Jalapenos orders registered
Period 10/28-11/6: 13 Jally's orders registered
Whatever math you do will have tons of fuzziness. More datapoints of shipping reports may be needed, but signs point to BFL accelerating their catch-up efforts on Jally sales.
Now for a good question: given the evidence above, if you had 3 BTC to spend, would you place a new order for a BFL Jalapeño able to run at 7GH/s and 65W, or order 3 Asicminer Erupters for immediate delivery running at 1GH/s @ 12W?