The nature of difficulty goes against mass production of ASICs. People always say they will create them for he benefit of the network and sell them. At the end of the day, if you can hash more quickly than everyone else you are not going to want to lose that edge. There is no point in ramping up the difficulty quicker.
Well this would be a good argument for all BTC ASICs being scams, except that BTC is so horribly volatile, as well as the startup costs for ASIC design is so high. Even if the company is run by true belivers, the investors and banks that give them money to pay for their costs won't accept that risk. ASICMINER is a special case in that they spent time gathering investors that believed in BTC, or who hedged for a rise in BTC; that venture capital has probably been vacuumed up by ASICMINER so I think a second market entrant of the same type won't be successful.That's why I think unless you're ASICMINER or are able to get investors from the BTCliebers, the only sensible business case right now is to sell the units as you'd sell shovels to gold rush miners, and do so quickly. You can't fund the design and startup costs with preorder money either, even if you might have gotten away with that in the past.
My guess is that they already have an ASIC design, perhaps Avalon's or ones of their own design, and that they have some funding standing by in case there is sufficient interest in the product. I don't know if they'll be able to deliver on time, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they start shipping before BFL does.
