Refund confirmed. Thanks to everyone for everything. Yes, especially you.

Whew, glad I checked in on this thread after a couple of months! bigbeninlondon, I've just PM'd you with my return address.

Does anyone want to sell me one chip? Like a stupid idiot I ordered 15 chips, and now everybody is talking Klondikes in powers of two.

Not me! Check out this super-mature response to a couple of customer questions that they posted on their forum: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/124-why-did-you-raise-your-prices.html

Word on the street is they're unable to stay within their thermal envelope, to the extent that their Mini Rig SC is now NLA...sorry, "out of stock"...due to an inability to vent all the heat generated inside the case. It seems that they over-promised, and instead of under-delivering have chosen not to deliver at all in favor of trying to work out the bugs. At this rate, by the time they do ship, difficulty may be so high (due to other manufacturers actually shipping ASIC miners en masse) that nobody will ever be able to achieve ROI...particularly since they just doubled their prices!

They evidently do have a prototype ASIC, however, so it's not total vaporware. bitcointalk.org user 'grnberg' got a review unit of the Jalapeno and popped it open: of the two chips installed, one was a dud, and the other was overclocked to compensate. It's a start. I'll spend my money elsewhere.

Let's put it this way: getting involved now will be better than getting involved in a couple of months, or a year, or never. At the moment it's generally profitable with the right hardware, but depending on your power cost:performance ratio the margins can be very small. I have cheap power, so that might be poisoning my opinion somewhat 

I personally recommend the Radeon 5870 as having the best performance/cost ratio right now. 5850s and 5830s are cheaper, but not enough cheaper considering their performance. The main advantage of the later generations of cards (6xxx, 7xxx) so far has been a decrease in power consumption (particularly when idle), but you won't be picking up anything recent that can pump out 400MH for a mere $120 on eBay!

Gah, so annoying! I bought into the Avalon ASIC group purchase but since I'm a n00b I'm unable to post my transaction ID on the thread.

Hopefully all goes well and I get my ability to post instated soon enough; otherwise I just lost 1.23 BTC to the æther