This is just my idea, hasn't been said either. I think it was an attempt to slow the selling of Hashlets by 3rd parties. Right now they post a [WTS] message on HashTalk.org. Then a ticket is submitted for each and every transaction for the Hashlets to be transferred to the new owner. That has to be a pain point for GAWMiners. It seems like long term there are plans to have a Hashlet market where transactions can be handled automatically. (Maybe I'm reading too much into it.)
I basically agree that there are a lot of unknowns here. I don't know what a Hashlet really is, I have my ideas but I don't know for sure. I can't account for the claimed hashrate, etc, etc. However, I'm hard pressed to outright call it a scam. For example I'm much more clear about PBMining being some kind of Ponzi scheme, but I'm not clear about the Hashlets. The thing that is different about GAWMiners is that these guys are easy to track down and if it really is a scam it will be bad for them in the end. A lot of other cloud operations are very shady in comparison to GAWMiners and it is much harder to find out who is behind it.
That's a good point. A marketplace is one of the promised features:
http://gawminers.com/pages/hashlet (towards the end of the page)
I'm not calling it a scam either but I think that a "financial instrument" or an "investment fund" would be a more appropriate title than a "cloud miner". Trouble is, those other titles come with all sorts of regulations and disclosures, whereas a "cloud miner"... well it's fluffy and that's about all we need to know. My 2 satoshis anyway.