BFL is supposed to be taking preorders today. ASICs are bringing huge changes to Bitcoin, ones that could even effect non-miners. I believe all of these changes will be for the best in the long run though. Now we can just hope that the openasic project turns something out in the next few months!
Yes, and they took preorders in Bitcoin primarily, and some estimates now put the amount of Bitcoin trying to be cashed out by their processor at $300,000 worth, which may be difficult for them to process in the near future. Since these preorders cannot be reversed and the estimated cost for an ASIC run is $3-5 million for all three devices and the time for development could be as long as 6 months or more, there is a very high likelihood we may see BFL not have enough money to do ASIC development for several months and the ASIC itself for several more months. In all, it could easily be a year or more before ASIC drops.
I think FPGA devices still have some play, but obviously these are all things to consider when ordering or implementing new designs. I know I would still buy Lancelots if they were developed, though I'd probably still prefer a quad-miner of some sort.
we (my team and some other core people) consider BFL have not spend any money on ASIC development yet. BFL's business flow is: announce dreamlike specs -> taking pre-orders -> find people to development -> if succeed, release and shipment. if fail, run. BFL sell products at super low price because their customer take all risks.
so now BFL is just collecting money for their ASIC project and avoid current delivery pressure (means they are running out cheap FPGAs).
if this business model succeeded, i will classified this as a shame of human intelligence.
and let me explain what is the "now in final stage development" mean. in ASIC design flow, this means RTL design is nearly finish. as a SOC or some other complex ASIC, RTL design and testing will take most of the development time. but mining ASIC is not a RTL complex design, it is a high computing density chip. most of the work is physical design, packaging and thermal design. RTL is less than 10% of the entire work.
What does the developer say? Do you have a solution for the bitstream yet? I'd love to buy one or two Lancelots rather sooner than later. Do you think it's risky to invest in FPGAs now? I'm not so worried about the energy efficiency but to achieve a high hash rate in order to still be able to compete at all with ASICs next year. I'm assuming the time for ROI is more than one year, or isn't it?
nearly finish.
the price will let the ROI in ~6 months.
let's see what will happen in the next 6 months.
Lancelot have the best power module(14A continuous and 25A peak, 85% efficiency, for each FPGA) and encryption support (eFuse key storage and volatile memory key storage). and opensourced. 
